


The Prince of Stars

by Mild_Guy



Category: Super Mario Bros. (Video Games)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Airships, Blood Brothers, Blood and Thunder, Dark Magic, Family Issues, Fantasy, Gen, Mirror Universe, Novel, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27113740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mild_Guy/pseuds/Mild_Guy
Summary: The surprise invention of airborne warships reignites war between the Koopa tribe and the Toads. When Prince Mario is taken prisoner by the Queen of the Mushroom Empire that she might abuse his powerful magic, Bowser launches a desperate raid deep into enemy territory to rescue him. The odds are impossible and there may be a traitor in his ranks, but if Bowser fails in this mission his kingdom, and perhaps the rest of the world, will fall.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	1. World 1-1: Don't Bring a Goomba to an Umbrella Fight

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the members of the Super Smash Prose Discord server, whose talents and wit are inestimable, for their invaluable help in drafting a summary for this fic.
> 
> AN: Please do not repost/redistribute this story without asking my permission first.
> 
> Bowser's kids are old enough in this AU setting that they're not minors in this fic. Nothing sexual happens with them anyways, but wanted to make that clear up front.

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy." - Ishirō Honda

~*~

Blood-red, deep;

Heaven knows how it came to pass.

Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets

And hard with the intention to keep them.

\- D.H. Lawrence, _Peach_

* * *

King Bowser arrived before the toppled gates of Koopa Castle to find his home burning. Churning pillars of smoke spilled upwards, flooding the sky black. And all those new holes they'd knocked through the curtain walls, well, he wasn't a fan.

Siege gun shot hammered the fortress, shaking its stonework into taluses of gravel. Immense balls of black iron plowed through crenelated battlements, demolished gatehouses, tumbled towers, and blew bastions down. The cannonade flew on strange trajectories, falling from the sky like heavy metal rain.

And the worst of it—the bastards doing this were nowhere to be seen. No target on which to vent his just and super-heated wrath. He'd met no patrols or defensive lines on the way in. The lands surrounding the castle were clear of firing crew nests.

As he strained for a better view of the phantom army dismantling his castle, Bowser caught a glimpse of something huge swimming around on high, hidden behind all the smoke. This called for a closer look.

Front door out of commission, Bowser picked a recently installed gap in the wall and slipped into the bailey. Here the dense smoke sank to the ground, pooling deep enough to reach his knees. He waded into the murk, head on a swivel searching for surviving troopas. No sentry, friend or foe, challenged his entry.

Some of the cannon shot bounced around instead of cratering into the flagstones. Their bounding toy ball dance belied a kinetic fury which could shatter shell and bone with the slightest brush. Bowser had a blast dodging these while the explosions of firing canons filled his brain until thought became impossible.

The bombardment halted abruptly, its ruinous work done—his castle half reduced to powder. Profound silence, almost holy, came down along with the falling ashes. He dared to pry his claws from his ear holes. No, not silence. Shock. And as numbness faded into the ringing of damaged hearing, a droning of many propellers beating the air broke through. He looked again to the boiling ceiling of smog, where a bulk of monstrous proportions split the black cloud banks against its brutal bow of bolted steel and splintering logs. The gray mouths of cannon glinted from double-decked rows of ports now closing their shutters. Bowser saw little else before this dreadnought of the sky tacked into several twisting columns of smoke and vanished, its sinister drone fading beneath the local noises of ruin in progress.

No time to ponder the unsettling implications of what, exactly, was _that thing_. There were survivors to find and a counterattack to muster.

Bowser weaved a twisting path through the bailey, circumventing hills of crumbled masonry and jumping over spent shot and newly opened fissures. Everywhere lay the slain. At a rough guess, from what could be glimpsed while barreling through the fog of war, the ratio of the dead was ten invaders for every Koopa. Bowser derived little cold comfort from this statistic. The enemy could easily afford thirty to one.

Even so, the small hope would not die that a larger part of the garrison had fallen back to continue the fight indoors, or fled for whatever hiding places remained.

A grisly monument reared from the churning gloom. Before the inner gatehouse the enemy dead heaped high enough to seal off the portal. Here his boys had made one hell of a final stand. He was obliged to clamber up a slope of slaughter and shattered weapons, some bodies still writhing and groaning beneath him, until gore glossed he slid down the lee side. As few as ten of the slain on the other side were Koopas, fallen where they had stood fast against the gruesome tide, and this gave his hope strength. Bowser stepped reverently over the honorable dead and passed through the portcullis whose bars had been exploded inward.

The great hall was a familiar space made alien by the debris of mayhem. Everything reeked of fear. Bringing the motifs of doom and destruction together were the throbbing crimson fires he had not lit himself. Bowser's small hope shrugged, hung up an 'out of business' sign, and shuffled off to find work elsewhere.

In every direction, indoors and out, the havoc wreaked awed him in its scale and intensity. They had planned this assault, took their time, watched and waited until business required he be elsewhere. Bowser had left on a far ranging to inspect the condition of his borderlands patrol companies and to pay diplomatic calls on the courts of neighboring kingdoms. In the middle of a three week absence, the enemy made their move.

What the invaders had not taken into account was Kamek. The magikoopa reached out through a sending while Bowser slept, interrupting a happy dream of dinner with a frantic warning that the enemy parachuted in from the sky _en masse_. Bowser returned with all possible haste, using every secret warp known to him along the way, and yet he arrived too late.

Down the gray stone halls a scream echoed. A human scream. Only two of that rare breed resided in the castle. A premonition of doom iced over his bowels.

Bowser barreled on, hungry for some brave hero to step into his path. He'd deal the fool a hurtin' which would pass into legend. A strange sucking hiss stopped him dead. He searched for the source of the noise, but the smoke billowing in through every window smothered out the light of the magma pools, making it impossible to see much further than the end of his nose. He inched toward the nearest pit and peered over the edge just in time to watch the last rivulet of luminescent orange trickle down a jagged crack in the basin floor. It was the same for the other pits—drained of lava with only scorched rocks left behind. Bowser howled in grief. Those magma pools were his pride and joy. Self-heating, guaranteed to stay in a molten state for a hundred years or his money back. Nothing made a lair a home like some classy red hot liquid rock, and he had paid dear in gold coins to have those pools installed. Oh, there would be blood for this.

A red-shelled Koopa Troopa hurtled flailing from the gloom and smacked beak first into Bowser's knee. Before his minion could sputter apologies, Bowser gripped the neck rim of his shell and lifted the crazed Koopa to eye-level.

"What's happening? Who's attacking us? How many of them? Where are they?"

The troopa shook his head. Already shivering, he began to quake in earnest. "There was an explosion. A lotta explosions. And then they were everywhere."

"Who?"

"The Toads." The troopa covered his eyes. "Swarming. Stabbing! We... we..."

"Okay, shut up and listen. I need you to gather up some guys. Form into squads and start sweeping this place out. Top to bottom. No one stays alone. Got it?"

The troopa nodded, though Bowser could see the doubt in his quivering eyes. This soldier was fighting the urge to locate the nearest exit and vamoose—a fight he was losing. Bowser set him down and leaned in close. "Listen. The Toads are cowards. They'll pick you off alone when they got the numbers on their side, but they'll turn tail and run if facing down two or more of you. Now get outta here and get your counterattackage on."

The Koopa nodded and wobbled off at top speed, face first into the nearest wall.

"That way!" Bowser shouted, pointing. The troopa gulped and sprinted off down a side passage. Bowser shook his head. At least the jerk was more afraid of his king than anything out there, just as it should be.

Another scream, distant yet piercing. Definitely human. It had come from the central keep. The keep that housed the living quarters. Cold electricity numbed Bowser's face and limbs. He sped up his lumbering gallop into a thundering charge, screaming at any surviving minions he passed, commanding them to organize and fight back.

 _Not again. Please don't let it be her. Not this time._ Stars knew, lasting peace was too much to hope for, but did his hated nemesis really have to come back so damn soon?

He spotted the Toads now, rounded heads and chubby bowling pin bodies skittering through the murk, hunched over the Koopas and Goombas and Shy Guys they had slain, little hands groping and little curved knives flashing as they stripped loot from the bodies of soldiers—prizes that included not just the equipment his minions carried but their very flesh as well. Koopa shells, in particular, were a prized commodity in the red markets of these abominations.

Rage twisted together with revulsion at the sight of these sapient vermin despoiling his home and scavenging the fallen remains of his brave troopas. The sheer affront to his honor on display, the towering disrespect of it all, provoked the inner fires. His chest became a furnace of wrath.

A set of the things, perhaps struggling under their shouldered glut of flesh and pillage, or filled with swagger and pride at their supposed victory, did not scatter as fast as they normally might when Bowser bowled into the clustered pins of their bodies. Bowser hosed them down with rolling boulders of flame breath hot enough to ignite the air. The Toads perished all too quickly, scorched into charcoal effigies of themselves, each frozen as his breath had found them in the motions of alarm and useless flight. Bowser stomped the brittle figurines, crushing them into sticky black crumbs.

The hall empty of targets and the blood thirst still thick on his tongue, the King of Koopas seethed at the bottom of the staircase which led to the dormitory wing of the keep. Up the stairs he roared and down the twisting corridors he raged until he stood before the door of Mario's room. The sprawled body of a friend was there to greet him.

Kamek lay in a pool of jumbled and broken runes. Words of sorcery written in eldritch light drained from his veins in lieu of blood. With a rattling gasp he strained to lift his head. Bowser flashed to Kamek's side, setting the aged head to rest in his lap. No tear in the robe, no visible sign of a weapon's entry wound on the magikoopa, but reckoning the way Kamek shuddered and struggled to breathe, Bowser knew his lifelong retainer had suffered a mortal blow. He cradled the small, matchstick-light body.

"Relax, Teach," said Bowser. "I heard your call and came running."

"Followed my instructions. For the first... time in your life." Kamek clenched his eyelids. "Haste... is paramount. Don't let her escape with the prince. Sorry, I..." The eyes opened once more, and as Kamek beheld his king's face for the last time, the ghost lights within him snuffed out. Scales grayed and wilted, bones and sinew crumpled into dust. Within seconds the remains of Kamek blew away on an ethereal wind into mystic dimensions, nevermore to wander the physical realm.

Bowser knelt alone in a bare corridor, haunted by the distant clamor of war.

He turned a red gaze upon the door to Mario's quarters and rediscovered a sense of urgency. There were still living friends to fight for, after all, and he would remember his vizier's dying instructions. After the bitch, full throttle.

Bowser kicked the door wide open just in time to watch Mario's last living bodyguard die. Goomberto leapt the fallen bodies of his brother guards and threw himself at a woman wearing a pink evening gown, fangs glinting in his yawning jaws. The woman leisurely swung her unfurled parasol at the Goomba. A pair of round, kindly eyes and a smiling half-moon mouth opened in the orange and yellow silk canopy. The parasol swallowed Goomberto whole. As much as he thrashed against the silk, Goomberto couldn't break free, his muffled squealing terrible to hear. Worse were the wet squishing noises as the parasol canopy began undulating. All this had taken three seconds while Bowser stood still in horrified fascination. Beyond the grave, Kamek was probably shaking his head in disappointment. Bowser swore under his breath and lunged, claws swinging.

The dainty woman's voluminous overskirt billowed as she vaulted over Bowser's seeking talons. A steel stiletto high heel jabbed him between the horns as she floated overhead.

Blood curtained down over his field of view. Bowser spun madly, hunting his prey. Mario lay corpse-still on his feather bed. A quick check confirmed the prince, wrapped in his favorite red leisure suit, was still breathing, thank the Stars.

"Hello again, Koopa darling," purred that hateful voice.

Peach, Queen of the Mushroom Empire, reclined atop the dresser and favored him with a smile that did not reflect what lurked in her eyes. The scalp wound still bled into his eyes but Bowser dared not wipe them clear and risk breaking, even for an instant, line of sight with the threat.

"You shell-shanking skank! You should be dead," he growled.

"'Should' is such a weak word, my vanquished." She looked as delicate as ever. He'd sell everything he owned to get that hourglass figure between his jaws, just long enough for one bite… "If only your spirit were as hard as your shell, I might consider courting you. Perhaps an eventual promotion into a minor consortship wouldn't be out of the question. Alas, I fear that airship has set sail—"

Bowser rushed her, claws reaching, maw snapping, saliva streaking. Peach drew the frying pan she'd hid down her skirt and with whipcord quickness hammered him in the cheek, shoving his snout aside. Bowser swallowed empty air and crashed into the dresser, smashing it to match sticks. Peach was already airborne, kicking down as she hovered overhead, stabbing his head once, twice with her spiked heels.

Momentarily blinded by a fresh downpour of scalp blood, Bowser struck and snapped about, hoping for a lucky strike. Though his belly ached to release the inferno roiling inside, Bowser dared not spew his flame breath in such a confined space. That would surely kill Mario, and Peach knew it.

Bowser heard the faint clack of Peach's shoes landing on the stone tiles behind him. He spun, sweeping out with his short tail. The tail of a Koopa is naturally small and stubby. People tend to forget that it's there. The queen did not get both feet off the ground in time. She tripped backwards with a startled grunt. Bowser lashed out with both paws to rake her open. Peach grabbed his forearm and swung herself up and over, giving him both a flash of her undergarments and the glinting steel of her pointy footwear as she kicked for his eyes. Bowser caught the ripostes on the tough scales of his free palm, then snatched her ankles before she could squirm to safety.

The queen hissed with rage, gloved fingers scrambling over her dress for another hidden weapon. Bowser laughed in vicious triumph and spun her around in lateral circles. By happy accident he smacked her head into the opened door. At full speed he let go, aiming her at the nearest wall. "Bye, bye!"

A mistake, for her dress flared out like a parachute, dragging at the air to save its master. Breaking several laws of physics, Peach reversed midair and landed on her feet, sticking to the vertical surface of the wall, crouching like a spider. Bowser had her cornered, blocking the window behind him and the door to his left. "No where left to fly, my dove," he growled.

Blood trickled from her split lip as Peach sneered back. "We dance so beautifully, and I have missed it. Even though you were always a clumsy partner." As she spoke, she slid a golden star from a hidden pocket. Bowser, two steps into a murderous charge, stopped dead. There was no mistaking that five-pointed shape and the strobing golden light it emitted. A Starman. She was desperate to use such a rare treasure. Or perhaps determined to see him dead this day.

Knowing it would mean certain defeat should she embrace the Starman's power, he plunged at her with renewed ferocity. Queen Peach pressed the Starman into her bosom and exploded into a cacophony of lights, shifting through every color that had a name and many that did not.

Transformed and invincible, Peach advanced on him, her every movement trailing delayed reflections, so laden was she with cosmic power. Yet she came on without hurry, savoring his fear, too bright and terrible to gaze on for more than a second.

Bowser watched anyways, though staring into the noon sun on a clear summer's day would've been more comfortable. Never had Peach looked more regal or glorious. A brush of her fingers would suffice to dispatch him to the Levels beyond death. He might lunge for the door, but she would almost certainly strike him before he crossed the threshold. And besides, running meant abandoning Mario. Bowser refused to leave a friend behind. All the same, it was now he who was cornered.

Lost to despair, Bowser inhaled deeply, knowing the heart-fed fire coiled within would do no more good here than his fists. Didn't matter. Any futile act of defiance was better than passively waiting for the grave to walk right on up and swallow him.

Peach smiled, her lips like solar flares. In a voice that made the stones of the keep shiver, she said, "Good bye, vanquished. This world will not miss you. Though I might recall you to mind whenever I need a laugh." Lace gloved fingers shimmering with a thousand colors reached out for his throat.

A sledge hammer pinwheeled through the bedroom doorway and slammed into Peach's shoulder. The weapon disintegrated into glowing white dust. Peach glanced sideways as if someone had politely tapped that shoulder. Luigi followed the hammer, a ragged, wordless bellow tearing from his throat. Wild eyes rolling in his berserker rage-contorted face, he seized her slender arms in his mighty fists.

"Damn you! How?" Peach stammered as Mario's brother forced her backwards, the heavy leather gloves he wore bursting into flame against her skin.

Peach thrashed but could not break free. She stamped her high heels down into Luigi's work boots, punching smoking holes into the blackening leather. Luigi roared and shoved harder, mouth frothing.

"Luigi, stop. She'll kill you for sure!" Bowser shouted, unheard. There was no reaching Luigi in this state.

Many-colored lightning sprouted from Luigi, arcing off his limbs and hair. He let go and slumped to the floor. Peach kicked him away, tsk-tsking with disgust, but already the Starman's light was fading, the colors cycling slower and slower.

Bowser threw himself bodily through the air. From seemingly nowhere, Peach held at the ready a white turnip of Sub-Con. The dread vegetable, native to the land of dreams and nightmares, had grown on one side of its pallid, fleshy root the face of a strangled man, lined and sagging. As Bowser descended upon her, Peach tossed the turnip contemptuously into his snout. The toxic vegetable slapped him in the skull and he knew only darkness.

The blackout did not last long. Bowser awakened to find the queen perched on the ledge outside the open bedroom window, two Toads laboring by her side. These fungal retainers bore the unconscious Mario over their heads as easily as hefting a sack of flour, a tether of rope secure around his waist. In the peace of sorcerous slumber, Mario's soft, clean-shaven face was smooth of all creases.

"No." Bowser's voice came out a horse croak. He commanded his arms to reach and his legs to stand, but they only half obeyed. Queen Peach blew him a kiss, then hovered backwards into the open air of the night sky. The Toads jumped down off the ledge, into what was a sheer five hundred foot drop to the spiked battlements below. The great whirring drone he'd heard in the bailey returned, drawing near and accompanied by the chugging of great engines. Just as suddenly as they'd swelled in pitch, these sounds began to recede.

Bowser crawled to the window and drew himself up with great effort. Peach and her Toads were gone from sight, but the retreating airship was easy enough to spot, its silhouette blotting out the stars as it flew away, a hulk crowned by a thousand whirling propellers.

Its shadow, cut from the light of the moon, flitted over hill and bog, like an omen of doom marking the land for death. His land. But for how much longer? Until that moment, airships had only existed in myth and the overheated conjecture of fringe scientists. He never thought he would see one, much less in operation. Such an invention would change warfare forever, and tip the balance of power still further in Peach's favor. Unless he did something about it.

He tried to catch a glimpse of the Toads bearing the enchanted Mario below decks, a last confirmation his friend remained alive, but the airship had shrank to a mote of darkness vanishing into the hungry blackness between the stars.

Bowser let go and slid to the floor, only to be greeted by another impossible sight. Luigi groaned and dragged his singed self to standing. Just how he could've survived contact with the Starman's power boggled Bowser, but he was nonetheless grateful for the miracle.

Luigi staggered over to where he lay, staring down with those dark, shut eyes.

"Get everyone together," croaked Bowser. "Tonight we convene a council of war."


	2. World 1-2: You Can't Pick Your Family, But You Can Pick Which Among Them Dies By The Hammer

"I don't think you really get what I'm about, old buddy," Wario said through a toothy sneer and a mouth loaded with mashed potatoes. A lifetime of experience had granted him the skill to speak clearly through a full mouth. The emphasis he placed on the word 'buddy' made clear that he and Bowser were anything but.

They sat around a square dinning table carved from expensive wispy oak, sharing a late supper in Bowser's private dining room. Constructed with blackest sorcery and cutting-edge insulation technology, the chamber was eavesdrop-proof. This conditioning had mercifully survived the airship's bombardment. Bowser tried not to think about how much coin he'd thrown at various artisans to secure this single room. All the more galling considering Queen Peach had spy and scry-proofed her entire castle with financial ease. In the span of that brief reflection, Wario tucked away the third course and had moved on to assaulting the pot roast.

No matter how much the world changed, the fat thief stayed the same. Morbidly obese, greasy mustache roofing a too-wide mouth, stunted of limb but nonetheless uncannily strong for all that. He wore the usual eye-searing outfit of radioactive yellow shirt and purple pants.

Wario waited until the server had dropped off another basket of biscuits and shut the door behind him before continuing. "I like treasure. I do it for the thrill of the gains ill gotten. The feel of gems tumbling between my fingers. That special clink that only gold coins can make." Throughout, he never stopped chewing. "On the other hand... Torture, getting iced in creative ways, dying explosively. Not my idea of a good time. Way things stand now, even havin' dinner with you in secret puts my bread sticks in peril of becoming intimate with the queen's clamps and pruners and other toys best not named. Get what I'm sayin'?"

Bowser did get it and did his best to dismiss from his imagination the bread sticks Wario alluded to. He made a grand show of shaking his head sadly. "So this is what the world's most fearsome treasure hunter has come to. After squeezing your fat ass into all those monster haunted ruins and pirate fortresses, now you turn chicken?"

Wario laughed in his face, then shoveled in another forkful of tender meat. " _Mmmph_. Good stuff. But hey, that's cute. The reptile's baiting me. Amateur hour, Bowser. What's next, reverse psychology? At least you started off strong with the grub." Wario shoved his chair back and slid off. Despite having just brandished the threat of walking out, the thief took his time to stretch and belch and scratch himself without taking a single step toward the door. A good sign.

Wario sucked gravy off his fingers. "Cut the crap, eh? We're both old pros here. Not that I'm gonna take the job, because it's insane, but curiosity compels me to ask: what's in it for me?"

"The queen has a treasure vault so vast, so gorged with wealth pillaged from vanquished kingdoms all around the world that it's generated its own myth cycle." Greed's twinkle sparked in Wario's eyes. Bowser grinned wide. The bait was swallowed. All he had to do was tug the line and set the hook. "What better time to discover how far the legends of the hoard fall short of the glorious, glittering truth than during a covert assault? My rescue operation provides the distraction. In the chaos you get a crack at the haul to beat them all."

The dreamy sheen of treasure lust dropped from Wario's face, leaving behind a deeply creased frown. Wario flopped down and grabbed two biscuits. He gnawed them into a mess, spraying crumbs as he talked. "I'd have to hit it fast… ain't no one guarding the doors I can't take care of. They've had it too easy for too long. The queen's rep's done the heavy lifting of scaring off all my competition. But if even one twerp guard escapes to raise the alarm—no, this is stupid. The stacked security measures, the layers of death traps. Hell, the freakin' multi-nodal matrix of locks alone—there's no way any scuffle of yours could last long enough for me to work my magic on the whole works, much less cart away the goods."

Bowser shrugged. "Not my field of expertise, not my problem."

"Yeah. Okay. Be that way. Good thing I'm too smart to ever consider taking such a suicidal job. Where the hell's dessert? Can we get some cake up in here?"

Bowser rang the bell, ordered his chef to bring on the pastry course, hesitated, then requested some pot roast for himself. Diplomacy was hungry work.

"You know who bakes a mean cake?" Bowser asked. "Our beloved queen."

"Heard that was a lie."

Bowser leaned back and stretched out, drawing a squeak from his perforated high-back chair. "Oh, no. It's a fact. I've tasted it. The events that brought me to that tasting make quite the tale and I won't bore you with it. But I swear on my mother's shell, the tort of the queen is positively life transforming. My sense of taste for pastry hasn't been the same since. Didn't even notice the poison. She slipped it into the frosting I think, so as not to disrupt the delicate texture of the cake. The look on that harpy's face was priceless when ten minutes later I didn't keel over and puke out my circulatory system." Bowser ran his tongue over his fangs, reliving the memory. "I'd recommend it, if you have a Koopa's tolerance for venom, that is."

"Can't say I'll have the opportunity to try it anytime soon." Wario's eyelids drooped. He fiddled with the silverware, perhaps deciding whether it was worth shoving up his sleeve. Time to give the line a sharper tug.

"That's a shame. So, staying healthy? Getting enough garlic?"

Wario nodded and flexed a bicep. "The manly figure's still intact."

"I see that. How's the island fortress holding up? The old homestead should be due for a renovation after all this time, I'd think."

The frown returned. Wario regarded Bowser through eyelids narrowed to slits. "Everything's fine, I'll thank you not to ask."

"You got quite a vault of your own there, according to rumor. Built by the pirates who used it before you cleared them out and claimed their home for your own, right?"

Wario stabbed a fork at him. "You're asking a lotta questions. Too many for comfort."

Bowser kept talking as if he hadn't heard. "What was their captain's name? Captain Syrup, right? She escaped the final battle alive if memory serves."

"That's it!" Wario swiped a napkin over his mouth and jerked out of his seat.

There came a sharp rap at the door. Wario shot two feet up into the air, eyes bulging.

"Easy there, big man. It's just the dessert."

Wario squared up for a bull charge at the room's only exit. The door opened and in rolled the kitchen staff with five carts of dessert. When Wario beheld the spread he froze, one leg still lifted to take the first step towards an escape now forgotten.

Bowser accepted a steaming plate of roast and set to with a vengeance. The pot roast tasted better than it smelled, and it smelled like a dream of ultimate flavor cooked into reality. Heavy on the garlic as he'd requested (a herb vital to longevity). The best his kitchens had prepared yet. No small feat considering most of their workspace was currently heaps of powdered stone.

Having poured the coffee, the servers excused themselves. The king and his guest dined alone once more. Bowser spoke around a mouthful of tender meat. "Siddown. I'll be offended if you let all dis go to waste."

Wario sat down, but his posture remained stiff, fat fingers twitching. Bowser noticed the eating utensils at the thief's end of the table had vanished. He waited until Wario picked up a mini-blackberry tort and placed it to his lips. "My baker is skilled, but he still falls short of the glory of Peach."

Wario stopped, jaw hanging wide. A few crumbs dropped from the tiny innocent cake in the vice grip of his fingers. Sweat seeped up to brood in deepening pools over his pimply brow. Bowser leaned over the table and snatched the tort from the thief's hand, popped it into his mouth and chewed noisily. "He's getting closer though. _Mmmmff_."

Bowser then picked up a sheaf of papers the chef had left rolled up between the trays of puddings and jelly rolls. He unfurled the documents and began to read, taking a sip of coffee as he did so. He kept half an eye on Wario, savoring the way the thief squirmed.

Wario, to the credit of his intestinal fortitude, picked out another tort and ate it in small bites as if it might explode if he took too much off in one go. The whole time his gaze kept darting to the room's single door. Finally, he screwed up his face and asked, "Okay. You win. What's that you're reading?"

"Oh, this?" Bowser asked, the very picture of innocence. "Just some security reports my intelligence network has gathered on the Orange Ocean sector. It's pretty dry stuff. I won't bore you with the details."

They shared a long silence together. Bowser finished the roast and started on a pudding and kept reading. Wario touched nothing else. He was looking a little pale and not at all hungry—a historical first for the thief.

"I—" The thief swallowed hard. "I live in the Orange Ocean sector."

"Yeah, that's right. Capt'n Syrup's old stomping grounds. I'd forgotten. What a coincidence."

It was Bowser's turn be startled. Wario slammed the table with his fist, the bang incredibly loud in the confined space. Silverware chimed against porcelain. The blow nearly flipped the table. "Spit it out, will ya!"

Bowser slowly set the reports down. "I know about the resurgence of the Black Sugar pirates. I know you know they're mustering a new fleet. Old Captain Syrup's out to get back everything you stole from her, with interest. She's sailing down from the glaciers of World 7 on a grand tour of the coasts, going as far south as Rogue Port. Along the way she's promising every cutthroat and sea dog who can so much as tie a knot or work an oar a cut of the take. All they have to do is hoist the Jolly Roger and sail with her to take back the fortress and mount your manly neck on a spike above the gate. It'll be quite the war. And wars are expensive, even if you fight them alone. Relocating in complete discretion with all your possessions in tow, that won't be cheap either. Certainly not if you want to move the hoard quickly, and believe me, you do want to move fast on this. I know you, Wario. I know how you hate to spend money. Peach has enough dirty lucre stockpiled to wage war with the entire world twice over. Hell, that's probably what she's saved it up for. Help me out. Score some loot and gain a grateful friend in me to lend a hand with your pirate problems. Can you really afford not to take the job?"

"My money isn't your business!" Wario's face purpled with fury. Fists half the size of Bowser's head shivered the trays of sweets as Wario held them clenched to the table top. A pang of doubt pricked Bowser. He had known it was a risk to ask help from the master thief. There were few in the entire world as unreliable and untrustworthy. Worse, the fat man was a tenacious enemy with the memory of a convict.

Wario continued ranting. "All the gold in the world can't bring you back from the dead. I've heard the stories! I know the kinds of things Peach does to a man if he makes her shit list. The kinda shit she's going to do to you soon enough. Mario's your friend. This is your war, not mine. You'd be better off forgetting Mario ever existed and planning your own escape."

Wario really was ready to bolt now. There was no choice. One chance remained to reel this fish in. "The way you abandoned Popple to his fate."

That brought the thief up short. He looked sideways at Bowser, grimace stretched taut with fresh horror. "How do you—"

"I know." Bowser kept his eyes locked on the thief's. "This won't be your first crack at Peach's vault."

"I hated Popple," Wario whispered. "He was competition." Louder now. "And an egotistical butt head besides."

"Imagine that."

Wario turned away, shoulders slumping. "But I respected him."

"He didn't survive long enough for you to steal all his secrets."

Wario shrugged, calm. "True enough. But he didn't deserve what he got. I fought my way clear, but I could still hear his screams. _She_ meant for me to hear. The show Peach put on later in the village square—I wasn't there!—but when I heard about it all later... It's something I struggle to forget." Wario snapped back into the present and scowled at Bowser. "If it'll keep you out of my business and Syrup off my neck, then we got a deal. I get inside and open front gate."

"No. I'll need the side doors unlocked."

"You bast—okay, fine! One side door. Then I grab the loot and you don't see me no more."

"Agreed and done." Bowser held up his coffee cup. "Let's toast the deal."

Wario snorted. He edged towards the exit, refusing to turn his back on his new partner. Bowser waggled a tray of lemon torts at him.

"C'mon. Take some for the road."

Wario accepted the tray. His expression twisted and it looked for a second as if he'd throw the cakes in Bower's face. Instead, Wario hopped backwards, ripped the door open, and charged out, taking the full tray with him. Bowser didn't mind. He had plenty of trays.

Seconds later, Captain Koops and Luigi entered the dining room.

Luigi emanated a presence to chill the skin. He entered whatever space you where in and the sun dimmed or the walls shrank close, and then he'd pin you in place with those dead, all-seeing eyes. Plants curled into themselves, their blossoms turned grubby, when Luigi's shadow passed over them. Bowser enjoyed the reputation of being the great reptile, but he knew he could never best Luigi for sheer cold-bloodedness.

Mario's brother had been a gentle man when Bowser first met him, before Peach began kidnapping his brother, before the waves of assassins attacking at random, before she locked Luigi in her dungeons after a failed rescue attempt. Luigi would not speak of what happened during those three nights and two days underground in the queen's care. That monster in a woman's blushing, rose-scented skin had a way of transforming everyone who crossed paths with her, and never for the better. Perhaps as Mario stayed gentle and vulnerable, Luigi was forced to harden up for the both of them. Luigi learned the hard lessons and walked the dark paths, and somewhere along the way lost his heart, except for one tiny piece of gristle he saved for his brother. The taller brother's body was blocky with hard muscles, rigged with thews of steel, yet limber from a hundred battles and a tireless regimen of training. Luigi wore the usual, what he called his "work clothes." Green shirt, green cap, thick work gloves that had once been white, and a pair of frayed, darkly stained denim overalls.

Koops, captain of the elite Kommandos unit, had likewise undergone a grim transformation. For him it was a razed hometown and an once-in-a-lifetime soulmate left broken and bled out in the ashes. But unlike Luigi, Koops retained some koopanity. To most others he remained the slump shouldered wall flower, bashful and quick to blush. The ol' softshell routine. Koops stayed his steel for when it was most needed: when he led his troopas into battle. When the enemy fell into his sights those hooded eyes focused with all the hard sharpness of a well honed knife, and all trace of insecurity's telltale inward curling straightened from his posture. Sometimes he even worked a bit of swagger into the performance, if he felt his boys needed to see it. Koops wore a bandage over his beak though the original crack had been mortared whole years ago. It served as a reminder of the past and for what he'd lost.

Luigi remained by the door while Koops helped himself to a chair.

"You're looking pretty content right now, boss. I take it the world's widest klepto signed on?"

"He agreed."

"You think he'll stick?"

"I'll trust him the day he can walk past a doughnut and leave it unmolested. What's the backup plan if Wario bugs out?"

Koops sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. He made a surreptitious glance at Luigi. Bowser gave a slight nod, signaling to his captain it was fine to discuss their sensitive plans before the man.

Mario's brother was not technically a part of the Koopa military. Luigi lived in the castle and worked with Bowser against the queen because of Mario. Ever since Bowser and Mario mixed blood and swore to each other they would be forever blood brothers, Luigi had come as part of the friendship package. And as long as Bowser's and Mario's interests aligned, Luigi would be there to make sure they got everything they wanted. If Mario and Bowser ever found themselves on the opposite sides of a conflict, if he so much as hurt one hair on Mario's head… well, Bowser was pretty sure he could take Luigi, but not without a terrible cost. He had seen what the strong hands of that man could do to his enemies.

Koops fidgeted. "Uhh, okay. Plan B. Right. The queen's castle boasts the tightest defense of any fortification in the known world. Ground, underground, the moat, the sea approach, and air space—all locked down airtight. The castle itself is garrisoned in layers of increasing security. Multiple patrols will sweep the same route at staggered intervals, though being Toads their scheduling discipline slips on the weekends. We know of a blind spot her patrols and guards overlook most of the time, but moving safely from there to penetrating the outer wall, that's the trickiest problem we have yet to solve.

"Toads are weak but they breed faster than mold in a warm fridge. My boys can take them on and win even when outnumbered three-to-one. Problem is, the ratio of us against them is going to be considerably more dire that close to the queen's nest. If even one of the little toenail spawn escapes an engagement and manages to raise an alarm, it's over. They could crush us with the sheer weight of their bodies just by dog piling over us."

Bowser rumbled. "A lovely visual image, captain. Perhaps poetry was your true calling."

Reaching up to touch his neck again, Koops gave a strained laugh. "Sorry, boss. Airdrop onto the roof might work. If there's any weak points in the garrison, we'll find them there."

"No good. She'll anticipate us hitting there first. What else?"

Koops shrugged. "High explosives."

Bowser clicked his talons together. "Ooooh, daddy likes the sound of that."

"But blasting a hole in the place will be next to impossible if we don't keep her busy on multiple fronts. Not possible with the small force of Kommandos we're deploying." Koops' eyes widened hopefully. "Unless—"

Bowser waved the unspoken request away. "My army stays put. If this goes badly, they'll be needed here. Peach will slap back at my kingdom for any trespass, if only to maintain face. She'd love it if we threw our main strength against her castle walls now. The next day Peach would be Queen of World 8. Nope. We send out just enough to make some noise along the borders. Make it look as if we're serious. Then I lead the strike team inside the Mushroom Capital. We'll try your blind spot. Wario either opens the door for us, or we use high explosives. If anything goes wrong on the way to the castle we'll pull back and try another day." He did not say what they would do if something went wrong once they were inside Peach's stronghold. He didn't have to speculate out loud. They both knew the likely result.

"Right." Koops didn't bother hiding his anxiety. His king entering enemy territory, a clawful of retainers at his side, was a nightmare come true. "Fewest casualties that way."

"Besides, Peach is expecting us to counterattack within the month. She might be planning to snatch my castle while we charge out like courageous idiots to the slaughter. I feel safer with our forces camping here. And you'll feel safer with one magikoopa attached to your unit. With rebuilding underway that's all the magical backup I can spare you."

Koops looked down, blushing that his next request had been so easily anticipated. "Right. I appreciate it."

"Speaking of mages, has Kammy gotten through to Sub-Con yet?"

"This just isn't your day for working with the overweight, boss. Wart isn't answering our calls. We can't tell if that's on purpose, or if something's putting up interference. Sub-Con isn't easy to reach at the best of times."

"Tell Kammy to keep trying. The frog owes me a few favors and it's time to collect on a couple of 'em. That everything?"

"Pretty much. We leave tomorrow at sundown."

Koops saluted and took his leave. There was a long checklist to complete and little time. Bowser stayed behind, alone with Luigi.

"Hungry?" He motioned at the remains of dinner. Luigi stared, unmoving.

"I promise you, I'll get your brother back from Peach or die trying. Just don't ask me for the odds on which of those is most likely," he said to Luigi.

Upon hearing the queen's name, Luigi dragged a fingernail down the jagged welt of scar tissue running over the left pleat of his throat. It was an old twitch, one that Bowser had seen far too often. It never grew less unsettling. Like Koops's bandage, touching it was a reminder of things lost and doors closed forever. Peach had given him that scar when she tried to slice his throat open with a spring-loaded knife hidden in the top of that vile living parasol of hers, and only just missed cutting deep enough. That had happened years ago, during the battle of Joke's End—the Mario brothers' first face-to-face encounter with their nemesis. Luigi fought the queen alone over the bleeding body of his brother, holding her off until help arrived. Back then Peach had been keen on eliminating Mario from her considerations rather than exploiting him.

Prince Mario. The Starfriend. Stranger from another universe. The only living creature with which the holy Star Sprites were on direct speaking terms. And they'd oblige, if he asked nicely enough, and Mario always asked nicely.

Bowser risked his shell and gambled the safety of his kingdom for Mario's sake—not just for his own ambitions, and not at all for the brooding Luigi, but because Mario was his friend and because this sad war blighted world needed its last light burning bright and uncaged.

Luigi tilted his head forward in acknowledgment and turned to leave. He stopped, hand halfway to the doorknob, big ears twitching.

Luigi turned slowly to face him.

Bowser almost had time to ask what was wrong when Luigi bolted forward and slammed into the table, flipping it over. Baked goods spattered the floor, transforming it into an impressionistic canvas. Luigi crouched to the floor, long fingers spidering over the gaps between the black and white tiles. In seconds he found a hidden latch and pulled open a trap door.

A shrill squeal of panic shot from the hole. Luigi darted headfirst into the secret space and then backed out, hauling up a thatch of rainbow hair snarled in one fist. The hair in turn connected to a head rounded with a face Bowser had hoped never to see again, alive.

"Iggy," Bowser hissed between fangs.

"Hey Dad—ow!—watch the 'do will ya?"

Luigi dumped Iggy Koopa into the dessert pile at the feet of his father and stepped back, one hand resting on the haft of his hammer.

Bowser struggled to keep his voice below a roar. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be holding down World 4."

Iggy adjusted his glasses and gave Bowser his most unctuous smile. "When I heard about the attack I warped here as quickly as possible. Then I listened in. Built this secret surveillance crawlspace years ago and you never found it. Years! Finally, today, conversations worth spying on."

Bower squeezed his temples between two fingers. "And why are you spying on us today?"

"Saves you from having to brief me on the relevant mission details, thus we operate more efficiently, see? And I hear you laying out this beautiful crazy doomed plan and I said to myself, 'Self, that's hot. What a wonderful opportunity to score some of that sweet, sweet validation from daddy dearest,' and here I am." He paused to inhale. "Experience informs us that there's always room in a suicide mission for one more warm body. You won't find more eager cannon fodder in the width and breath of the land than I. And I can be more helpful at your side than playing a similar role in the contested lands. How about it, Dad?"

Bowser returned to his chair. He picked up the coffee cup, threw it against the wall, then took up a neglected bottle of wine and began chugging. The wine was fine, but it couldn't rinse away the bad taste Iggy brought to his mouth. While Iggy looked on, and Luigi glared at Iggy, Bowser sought for a benefit hidden in this setback and found none.

"I never meant for you to serve as—you know what? Fine. I don't even like you enough to lie to your face anymore. I did want you to die fighting for an island I have no use for. And as your father, I order you to get back to it."

Iggy danced a jig of obscene delight, the glare in his bottle glasses swirling. "That's what I love about you, Dad. Well, one of several things I love about you. There's no self-righteousness to your poor parenting. It's so... The word I'm thinking of is honest, I guess."

Bowser smashed the empty wine bottle against the wall. "You've sold me out to Peach!"

"Yes, on multiple occasions. What I can say? She promises me hot, frantic weasel-styled lovings in exchange for state secrets and sabotage, and I keep giving them to her. Though I harbor suspicious she has no intention of ever upholding her end of the bargain. It hardly matters. Abuse and neglect are the drugs I'm hooked on. By the Stars, when she grinds my face beneath her high heels..." A sharp suck of air let out in a shuddering sigh. Iggy produced a soiled red stiletto heel shoe and rubbed his cheek into its scratched up leather. "Spicy, oh yes. Between the two of you I almost get enough punishment. I'm a very needy Koopa."

"What you are is worse than useless to me. Especially now."

Iggy dropped the shoe and went down on all fours. He crawled, his crazed eyes seeming to whirl with strange colors under the thick lenses. On his approach to Bowser's feet he stopped to scoop up a finger of whipped cream and sucked it off with exaggerated moans of pleasure.

"I'd concede the point, under most circumstances. But this time I can make a difference. Just give me one last chance, Dad. I want your forgiveness." He laid his head down on his father's feet. Bowser kicked him off.

"Forgiveness?" A second wine bottle in his clenching fist cracked, then shattered before he could club it over Iggy's head.

"Forgiveness!" Bowser reared up and with a savage kick rammed his pointy toenails into the beige undershell of his son's belly. It wasn't enough. He gave Iggy three more punts as his son tried to crawl away.

"Your games have cost hundreds of my citizens their homes, their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives. In the past I've pardoned your traitorous shit because you are my son. I've got the heart of a tender idiot. Thank the Stars the rest of me ain't so dumb. There is nothing like forgiveness inside of me for what you did to Lemmy. Nothing you can promise or do will ever lift that black stain off your shell."

Iggy let out several pained wheezes. When he saw that Bowser had finished kicking him for the moment, he used the wall to drag himself up to standing. "Okay. Forgiveness off the table. Right. Then at least I can still make a positive difference. You have to believe me, I want to help our people."

"I don't have to do anything."

Iggy ignored him. "I feel very much responsible, especially for this latest drama. I am responsible, in fact. That airship she attacked in? That was my design. It's the first prototype the queen's factories have built to completion. Over the last two weeks she's been taking it on its maiden voyage, raiding deep into Sarasaland, practicing up for today's strike against you, I bet."

Perhaps it was merely the sound proofing, but suddenly the private dining room grew ten times more quiet. Quiet, save for Bowser's heavy breathing. The King of the Koopas clenched and unclenched his claws. He raised one foot, found he could not savor Iggy's cringing, and lowered it.

When Bowser finally spoke, his voice creaked with barely restrained wrath. "No nation has yet built a working airship larger than a dingy. Until now. And it's the most powerful tyrant on the planet—my personal nemesis—that's achieved the military breakthrough of the age, which will forever alter the nature of war. Right. Yeah. Fine, it's only to be expected, really." Iggy began to speak. Bowser raised the back of his hand. Iggy slammed his jaws shut with a clack. "Not gonna ask why. Don't care how or when. All I'm gonna do is ask Luigi to execute a traitor, and then my evening will be complete. Luigi, please kill my insane son before he hurts anyone else."

Luigi nodded, a spasm racking his lips, perhaps his version of a smile.

"Hilarious Dad. Best one in a while," said Iggy. Behind the smeared glass slabs of his spectacles his eyes flicked between father and Luigi, closing in.

"I deserve it, fount of ill-considered wit that I am. But I can and will do better. P-please call off Scarneck now." But Bowser did not call off Luigi. He watched with a slack, blank face as Luigi lunged in and snagged Iggy once more by the hair.

"Dad! It's no fun if he does it. I don't want to—" The rest was lost in a groan as Luigi buried his fist deep into Iggy's midriff.

"Give him one more," said Bowser.

Luigi put some gusto behind his fist this time. Blood whistled out from Iggy's mouth along with the hot air.

Luigi threw him to the floor. Iggy's spiny carapace acted like the legs of a tripod, preventing him from rocking back and forth to gain the leverage necessary to winch himself upright. Arms and legs groped weakly at the air for purchase.

After an agonizing intake of breath, he sputtered, "This is a mistake."

Luigi didn't agree. He planted one boot on Iggy's belly. The enormous black head of the hammer glinted in the candle light. Slowly, Luigi raised the hammer high over head, dark and certain as an ancient doom.

Iggy squeezed his eyes shut. "I know where Peach keeps the blueprints." Luigi looked to Bowser.

"The airship blueprints?" Bowser asked.

"Yes."

"She's already had them copied. And she already has a working ship. The damage is done."

"They're not worthless to you."

That was true enough. Yet, Bowser wanted a better reason than this to stay Luigi's hammer. "And?"

"I've spent enough time around her to know her quirks. Peach is too paranoid to have the designs copied more than once. One copy she carries with her, the other's locked up in the castle. The airship she has now was a partially complete prototype that I built, so her shipwrights aren't intimately familiar with all the overall structure yet, much less the fine machinery of its motors and drive shafts. Their understanding of material science pales in comparison to ours, so they don't know how to make a ship light enough to fly. If we're successful tomorrow, we can destroy her ability to mass produce an armada. Or at least put her grand plans a year behind schedule." Iggy wheezed to catch up on oxygen intake. "While hanging out with her, I spied where she hides her most valued possessions. I'll show you."

Bowser waved all this away. "She'll have the spare copy in her vault. No way Wario's going to make it inside. We wouldn't have a prayer."

"No. She has a super secret walk-in office safe for the really sensitive stuff. I'll show you where."

Luigi watched Bowser for his reaction. Bowser did not think he could trust Iggy anymore than he could Wario. At least the 'treasure hunter' was driven by hungers he understood. That made Wario predictable. Yet, if even half of what Iggy said was true, then he might be able to keep his kingdom's head above the lava for a while longer. If Peach constructed even a small fleet of those soaring battleships before anyone else could, then the fate of the world was sealed.

Bowser scratched his expansive chin, dragging out the suspense. All for show. The decision was made.


	3. Okay Broomer

A crescent moon grinned from a black velvet night over a midnight blue land accented red by lava glow. Evil faces of shadow and blood light twisted over the hills of coarse volcanic stone. Skeletal trees stretched barren claw branches to the pitiless sky and skull monuments of freakish size leered from the tops of cinder mounds. A blasted soot trap of a land. Bowser breathed in the sulfurous air. Just... lovely. World 8. His kingdom. If he could keep it.

Before Kammy descended into view, one could hear her grumbling.

"It's so cold this time of year! Spoiled brat, that's what he is, dragging an old woman out of bed in the middle of the night. No wonder Kamek allowed himself to die. He knew he'd find better working conditions on the Other Side." Like the last, blighted leaf of autumn to fall, Kammy traveled a meandering path down to the rooftop landing pad.

"Wonderful to see you again, my lady. It has been too long," said Bowser. He stepped forward to help her off the broom.

"Pah!" She waved him away and marched for the roof stairs, eager to take shelter in warmth. She looked mostly the same, perhaps a bit more stooped beneath her well patched robes, but her dismissive hand flaps were as graceful as ever. Her tongue still held its edge. "Spare me the regal courtesy. Politeness suits you about as well as a necktie on a gorilla."

Bowser escorted her to the study, where a hearty fire roared in an enormous chimney of slate and black iron. A kettle of worm root tea steamed.

"Really, boy. The middle of the night! The queen will very much still be there tomorrow, unfortunately. Is the rush really necessary?" She downed a long, loud slurp of tea. Half a snail scone lay in crumbs over her lap. Fed and warmed, her grumpiness receded an iota.

Bowser leaned over in his chair, wagging his eyebrows. "Are you telling me secret night meetings and the plotting of bloody deeds have lost their savor?"

Kammy rolled her eyes, a gesture visible even through the opaque bottle lenses of her spectacles. "Don't waste any more of my time than you have to. And don't you give me any lip about impertinence. I'm not on your payroll anymore so don't expect the subservient act from me!"

"Wouldn't dream of it, you decrepit hag. Now, if you're done wheezing and creaking, let's get down to business. I need your help. Unless a week from now you want to be licking Peach's slippers clean for the privilege of staying alive. She holds different views than I do about the proper conduct of servants."

Kammy tried and failed to suppress a shiver. Then her beak assumed a wry set. "Since the days of your wasted youth you've gotten better at the art of persuasion. Where has my nasty, uncouth little boy gone?"

"He's grown up to be a wicked king." Bowser grinned hard enough to let some teeth show and leaned back to chug some tea. Same as the piece in the dining room, the back of his high-backed chair was perforated with holes that accepted his spines with precision fit. "Peach still thinks I'm a child. By this time tomorrow night I'll show her otherwise. Or die trying."

"Likely the latter." Kammy sniffed. "I almost regret I won't get to see you ripen into full rottenness."

"Full of encouragement, as always."

Fire glared off Kammy's eyeglasses, turning the lenses into bottomless holes of orange light. "What do you need from me? If it's battle magic, I believe Kamek left you plenty of apt pupils fit to toss into the meat grinder."

"Naw. Mostly green horns and amateurs. Our training program for mages died with Kamek. It'll take us a year to churn out a class of journeykoopas, and that's even if I could convince you to take the job of teacher...?" Bowser pasted on his most ingratiating smirk and gave the witch a pleading look.

Kammy shook her head. "Not a chance. I'm more inclined to eat the young than instruct them these days."

"I was afraid of that. But the rumor mill tells me you have a promising apprentice of your own, hidden away. Either she's too tough to chew or your love for teaching still beats out your hunger."

"Don't believe everything you hear."

"And accept you're happy living alone, with no one to boss around? We've always had that latter passion in common."

Kammy smirked and wriggled in her seat. "Well, there's so much I've learned down through the years. It'd be a shame if all my secrets were to die with me."

"I need her for a special errand. Rumor is she's a real Captain Falcon with a broom. Which comes from studying under a former broom racing world champ, I bet."

"Who's been feeding you these tawdry lies? I'll pickle their tongue." Kammy flicked snail crumbs to the carpet, doing her best to suppress a grin. She hated for anyone to know how much she enjoyed flattery.

Bowser nodded. "I'll have them silenced immediately. Your apprentice would provide vital help to our cause. With the plan I've worked out, she'll stay distant from any fighting."

"Promises, promises."

"One flight, and she goes right back to whatever nest she calls home. Think of it this way. I take a dirt nap tomorrow because I don't have the very best working at my side, then my kingdom falls, and your star student will live in a world of danger unimaginably worse than what she'll face tomorrow night in a single, brief sortie."

Kammy's hacking grunts of disgust were sincere this time. " _Hurmph_. Sweet talker. Fine. As long as it's a quick run."

"It will be. For her."

"Only one quick run. Done and done. Anything else, you waste of eggshell?"

"Yes. Stand in for Kamek tonight. Advise me."

"Certainly. Don't do it. That's my best advice, right there. Sell this heap and go on permanent vacation. Preferably to somewhere tropical, where they serve good drinks. Strongly consider taking me along. While you fight against the queen, you'll get nothing so good out of life as that."

"Not sure that's a vacation I'd survive to enjoy for long."

"No, but it'll last longer than this fool mission of yours, and be more fun besides. Life's about quality, not duration. Take it from those who know." She ran a wrinkly paw over her aged cheek.

Bowser rose and stood by the fireplace, a chill creeping up the inside of his shell that had nothing to do with the dropping temperature outside.

"Maybe I'll take you up on that, if things go badly. If I survive to run away."

"You won't get the chance," squawked Kammy.

"Then I'll fight all the harder, knowing I don't have an out." Time and distance had changed nothing. The decrepit witch had been his childhood governess, always older, always a step ahead, and she could never ever fail to let him know it. Bowser forced himself to breathe slower. "Help me or don't, but I'll make it worth your while. Your pupil will want for nothing, if her future's what you're worried about."

"She'll be wanting breathing privileges."

He clenched a fist, leaning against the mantel to hide it. "Since when has mere death been more than the great Kammy can handle?"

"It's not my power that's falling short. It's the queen's might surpassing all. She has more of it than is seemly. Perhaps, instead of futzing about with a spoiled brat, I should fly on over to her boudoir tonight. Bargain with someone who has a bit of real sense between her ears."

Bowser launched across the room. Kammy almost slipped away at an oblique angle to space-time into some obscure dimension, but she wasn't as agile as she used to be. Snarling, Bowser hauled her up by the neck and squeezed hard.

"Think you're the only one with someone worth protecting? Cross me, hag, and tomorrow the queen will have company in my stomach."

"I'll skin you. Skin you and boil your bones for broth," Kammy seethed. He held her until she calmed into an icy silence. Then he dropped the magikoopa back into the chair like dumping a bag of trash. He returned to his chair and they glared across the room at each other. Between them the kettle had frosted over, the tea within frozen solid.

Bowser gave in first, snorting, then rocking with idiot mirth. Kammy cackled, slapping her knee. "Ah, just like the good ol' days," she said, wiping away a fake tear. "Heh ehhh. We're burning nightdark, so lay out this plan of yours and I'll tell you what little I think of it."

For the better part of an hour, Bowser and Kammy fell into cozy routines they had developed growing up and growing old as co-conspirators. The king brought the goals and objectives, the magikoopa suggested practical intermediary steps and tactics. Bowser brainstormed and Kammy critiqued. Soon they had refined the original scheme into a game plan that, if one were to view it from a skewed perspective, might almost work.

"One last thing, grandma. Whip out your crystal ball and see if there's anything to see," said Bowser.

Kammy huffed. "You never believed in the scrying crystal."

"Yep." Bowser nodded. "I think it's full of crap. All those canny predictions came from that pickled walnut of yours. The rest was just theater."

"My, where did you buy such a silvered tongue?"

Bowser traced spirals with the tip of his index claw into the armrest varnish. "I've seen ghosts. Talked to them, walked through their haunts. Their king is a gibbering idiot and his subjects are worse. No spirit in our world has anything useful to say. But this is the Queen of the Toads we're talking about here. Way I figure it, if she traffics with higher powers as gossip says, then maybe you can use that thing to intercept some of those spooky messages. Then again, if Peach herself spreads those rumors, then what's the harm in listening to one more fortune cookie reading?"

The shifting shadows deepened across the magikoopa's lined face, as if, even while sitting still, she somehow drew back from the fire. Her beak took on a grim set, cold where her frowns of disapproval and anger had been animate with warmth. She spoke in funeral tones. "If the crystal's readings are so much japery and hokum as you say, then take warning, boy. Do not malcontents first conceal their treasonous intentions in half-joking mutterings? Does not the angry mob first whisper and speculate and finally shout of the violence they desire, all in the course of bringing it to reality? Do not forest fires and earthquakes and half-mile-high waves arrive in the company of their own horrible noise? Beware the chatter of nonsense and easy lies, o king."

Bowser rolled his eyes. "Now I understand all the screeching you used to pass off as lullabies. You weren't trying to put me to sleep, but make sure I never woke up."

"Or maybe the whining a certain snot-nosed baby drilled my eardrums nonstop, driving me mad and threatening to put me in an early grave."

"Seriously though, prognosticate for me already. The night's nearly over. I promise I won't rent out any headspace to riddles and bad poetry."

"You always were good at forgetting." Kammy sniffed. "Fine. But I'm not responsible for what the Other Side has to tell me."

She produced from thin air a cluster of unpolished, purple crystals. Kammy set it down on a side table and began to stroke the hexagonal minerals. An umber glow rose within the crystals, the color at odds with the medium which channeled it. Bowser's eyes felt sore looking at it. He wondered if he had time to run and get a snack. He rose as Kammy began a keening chant. Yeah, definitely snack time.

A loud, brittle snapping, as if from glass overheated to the point of cracking, startled Bowser into halting his kitchenward trek. Steam boiled up from the scrying crystals. Lamps dimmed and the hearth's warmth retreated. Kammy turned to face her king, spectacles shining with a strange light that did not originate from the fireplace. She spoke in a voice not wholly her own.

"When the hand of fate holds you in its fist, turn from ugliness to beauty."

A long pause. Bowser noticed his breath no longer fogged from his nostrils. Light sources quit their cowering and resumed their previous luminosity.

"Wait, that's it?"

Kammy shuddered, then sagged, suddenly boneless. Bowser squeezed her hand and plied her with melted tea. After a short while, the old magikoopa coughed and sucked in air so hard her throat whistled.

"Hope whatever was said helps," Kammy croaked. "Better make a note because I remember none of it."

Bowser had not the heart to tell her it was just another fortune cookie saying. Even so, after the aged matriarch beat a hasty retreat to the rooftop and set off on the long flight back to her warm hovel, Bowser took care to repeat the message from Beyond until he had it memorized. Something about this eldritch advice appealed to him. Simple and direct, so that the customary vagueness didn't grate as it normally would. Chose beauty over nastiness. What a novel idea. Kinda demanded to be remembered. Who knew when a line of quality gibberish might come in handy.


	4. World 4-2: Midnight Bathroom Stall Assault

One fine night, with the ease of venturing out on a moon viewing picnic, King Koopa and his company strolled unchallenged into the Mushroom Empire.

The borders of the Mushroom Empire boasted no fences. Where the queen's world began and the domains of others ended, there were no walls, fortresses, watchtowers, or even so much as a rickety wooden 'Keep Out' sign to mark the invisible boundary. Patrols seldom pounded the dirt of these outlands. Here the grasses and weeds grew tall, yet birds and beasts were scarce. The hills and clouds that had eyes looked upon this green pause of open land with blank expressions. An innocent stranger, ignorant of the local geopolitical situation, would see no warning or hint as to the importance of the ground he trod. Peach preferred it this way. Hidden, anonymous borders increased the odds of victims wandering onto her turf, never to return. An entire Toad family could feed off an unlucky trespasser for a week.

A few miles in one met the sparse outcroppings of the Toad suburban sprawl, housing tracks like a speckling of black mold in a dank corner of an under-sink cabinet foretelling the full blown infestation to come. Careful not to clump together, the Koopas kept low and avoided the streets when they could. They sprinted through backyards, over unkempt moss lawns, passing grubby swing sets and slimeboxes and barbecue grills closed and cold.

Koops' handpicked team for this mission consisted of twenty-four elite kommandos: fourteen combat specialists; six engineers well versed in explosive demolition; three heavy weapons experts of stout hammer brother stock; and one magikoopa. Bowser huffed and steamed, doing his level best to match the pace of his elite soldiers and not make too much noise doing it. Behind him Iggy ran smiling, tongue lolling free, noodly arms trailing, a wicked child set loose to play. He wore a white lab coat equipped with many pockets, all of them crammed with junk he was always threatening to show off. Along with the mad scientist threads, his multi-colored hair made a mockery of the dark blues and browns everyone else wore to blend into the night. Luigi brought up the rear, the quietest of the lot, hammer in one hand, a fresh plucked fire flower gripped ready in the other.

They were especially cautious around windows and doors. The wishful thinking involved ran thus: if a Toad happened to look up from whatever glum activities kept them busy of an evening and they caught a glimpse of what was marching over their property, then hopefully the sight of so many badasses bristling with weaponry would discourage interference. The queen's citizens were well conditioned to deny their curiosity and stay inside when strange noises and shadowy figures of a martial aspect passed by their homes at odd hours. Toads were cowardly by nature and more fond of their own spotted, spongy hides than of duty to the empire. No matter the rational, the risk of discovery was great. Peach may have offered a generous bounty for news of invaders, and if a Toad thought they could call in a tip without risking foreign soldiers skinning their cap from their stem, they just might decide benefit outweighed risk.

For several blocks it seemed as if the band of rescuers would manage the unlikely and creep their way unseen through the whole damned neighborhood. Then the inevitable claimed its due, as it always must before the end.

Over a high fence and through a thorny hedgerow, the Koopas blundered in on two Toad children playing 'prisoner of war' in their back yard. They were barely older than sprouts. Scattered around them were action figures of Koopas and Goombas and assorted enemy races in varying stages of disassembly. A Bowser doll had been decapitated, a nail hammered through its shell. Beside it, a Luigi action figure waited its turn with firecrackers stuffed into its joints, the fuses twisted together. The brats were holding the face of a hammer brother figurine into a match flame, savoring the way the plastic blistered and curdled, when they squinted up at the soldiers rustling and grunting their way through the clumps of blackberry bushes at the edge of the yard. When the soldiers stopped to stare back, the kids sprang up without so much as a yelp and ran for their two-story mushroom house. Behind them they slammed closed the sliding backdoor.

Koops looked to Bowser, who after a second's hesitation, nodded. The captain motioned two kommandos toward the house—Gep and Garry, a Goomba pair of close-quarter specialists.

They cut the lines running into the house, careful not to sever the phone service and power to the other homes on the block, lest neighbors venture out to investigate. The house's windows went dark while those of the other homes remained lit. Toads were more comfortable in darkness than Koopas, but Goombas shared their affinity for lightless environments, by virtue of being close evolutionary cousins.

Faces scrunched in concentration, Gep and Garry unlatched the backdoor's simple lock and crept inside. Unasked, Luigi circled to the front of the home, both hands on the haft of the hammer.

The rest settled into what concealment they could find and concentrated on staying still and listening hard. The air barely moved. A quiet night, yet silence pooled nowhere deeper and more profound than inside the walls of the little two-story house.

 _A king must make hard decisions, or else he is no king at all_ , Bowser reminded himself. A restless cold nausea trawled his guts and this too he accepted. A king took such things upon himself. What other way was there?

After what felt like both an endless hour and too short a time to finish the work with the diligence the situation demanded, Gep and Garry emerged and mouthed the signal for 'all clear.' They fastidiously scraped their footpads over the moss while Luigi appeared around the far corner, wiping his hammer with a child's overalls.

Koops had words for the reassembled party, spoken in the quiet, disappointed tone he reserved for reprimands. "This was sloppy, Koopas. Let's step lighter and crawl lower from here on in. Now, put your shells into it. We've got time to make up."

Further in the spacing between houses narrowed until one lopsided abode curled against another, and the neighborhood less and less mimicked the architecture and layout of civilized kingdoms. Weatherboard cottages and brick single-stories gave way to a crop of hovels and split levels installed inside hollowed out giant toadstools and mushrooms. Groves of fungus grew in place of trees, rippling ridges of fungal 'ears' climbed walls instead of vines, and great spore balls and various porous growths crowded the lanes like shrubs run feral. As the Koopas traveled deeper, the plant life with which they were familiar grew scarcer until it vanished entirely, while the fungus stems increased in height and girth, swollen bulbous caps reaching gigantic proportions. Some fungal life burned cold blue and green with luminescent light. Other fruiting bodies grew shaggy with whiskered growths. The wild gardens of the Toads graduated into a dense jungle of pale, shivering life.

A thousand, thousand spores danced moonlit on the stagnate air and made every indrawn breath an adventure. All smelt of wet decay and mildew and a strange, dirty spice that burned the nostrils the more one inhaled it. Bowser felt his sinuses crawl and soon they were all stifling sneezes and dabbing at dribbling snouts. A heavy damp freighted what little of the night breeze reached them. The soldiers scrunched necks down into shells, pulled up collars and retied scarves over nostrils.

Above the highest toadstool loomed inward-leaning canyon walls which shielded fungus and Toad alike from the cleansing rays of the sun. There were many such furrows gouged out of the landscape by Toad engineers. To walk into the queen's domain was to leave the surface behind and descend into a half-buried land of shade. Here was Toad Town proper. Like the cool patch of northern lawn a house might overshadow, where the grass grew thin and the gray caps and moss thrived in the dearth of sunlight, the Toads were a slimy and diseased race multiplying in the breaks and crevasses of a shattered geography just as mold thrived in the cracks between bathroom tiles. The Mushroom Empire was a poorly ventilated, unwashed shower stall kinda place. A dominion of scum festering under the planet's toenails.

Since it would hardly do to walk boldly down open streets lined with the packed rows of homes and businesses, the rescue party braved the suburban jungle near the canyon walls. They boosted each other over fences and hacked through the undergrowth. All the while, they stayed alert for any Toad unlucky enough to discover them. At least they now had plenty of cover. What few warp pipes they found were sealed, the lids warded with sensor spells.

Like any other jungle, wildlife stalked the dark places beneath the caps. Ululating howls rent the clammy jungle night. Occasionally the glowing undergrowth would thrash, hunter and prey squealing and growling, then all went still with no sighting of the creatures behind the commotion. Eerie croaking and lilting notes of wild song combined into an atonal symphony, the music of the shuddersome wildlife of the deep underground imported up to this once-alien habitat made suitable for them. Toadstool towers would yaw and sway suddenly, fibrous trunks groaning as they bent before the passing of some hulk marauding unseen mere meters distant the line of struggling kommandos. Eyes, in twos and threes and sixes, glowing with the deadlights of ghosts, watched from the black hollows between mottled trunks.

Kollins, one of Koops' lieutenants, recoiled from a nearby strand of ink caps with a yelp. Koops clamped a hand over his beak and hissed for quiet.

"Hell was _it_?"

"Something sickly yellow, and segmented. And long. It had more legs than you could count in one look."

"Wiggler," said Koops. "Leave 'em alone and they probably won't eat you. Keep your damn traps shut. This plan relies on discretion, remember? Besides, there's far worse living among these mushrooms than wigglers. We don't need their attention."

"Like what?" asked Kopernicus, a green recruit.

"Keep yapping and you might find out," growled Bowser. "Haul ass. We're behind schedule."

"We'll make up time once we get out of these damn residential zones," said Koops in the lowest register he could manage.

It took the better part of the night for this to happen. Hours of cutting and slogging through the Town Toad jungle, over how many miles there was no guessing, until change arrived like a slap to the snout.

With all the abruptness of glancing down mid-stride to discover a bottomless pit yawning where one was about to set one's foot, the canyon walls to either side ceased and left the sky open. The road ahead rolled downslope into miles-wide flatlands. Here the suburbs of Toad Town transitioned into the commercial zones of the Mushroom Empire capital city—a sullen, gray waste brooding under ten thousand cones of orange sodium vapor light. If land was formed from emotion rather than strata of stone and clay, then this place manifested the sinking feeling when one catches their lover scratching shell with another Koopa.

On the lip of this titanic bowl of earth the rescue party paused to survey the obstacles yet to come. In contrast to the wild crowding of Toad suburbs, the capital was a bleak grid of strip malls and factory outlet plazas and restaurant chains and warehouses farther than the eye could see or the nose could scent. The queen allowed her subjects to grow their homes at random, but at the seat of her power she brooked no inefficiency. A semicircle of drear hotels reared in the distance like a prehistoric shrine of monoliths erected by giants, the towers dark save for a few pale scales of backlit windows. The hotels hosted visiting merchants and diplomats from other kingdoms. Bowser had twice been a guest at one of those hotels. The capital was the only aspect of the Mushroom Empire foreigners were allowed to tour. If they wished to survive they obeyed the rules. A ways behind and beyond the hotels were the walled palace districts of the wealthy elite. Though he was a king, he had not been invited to enter that exclusive enclave.

Desolation stole into Bowser. The vista before them paved over his soul. Though not his first view of the capital, its effect upon him remained undiluted by revisits.

This had been a fair land, once. Clear, sweet streams, fertile plains, verdant forests where the trees and clouds smiled upon all who walked below. In those days the Toads kept to their grottoes deep underground and seldom harassed the vigilant republic of peoples who ruled this domain with wisdom and respect. All this changed with the coming of Queen Peach Toadstool.

The story of her origin had as many versions as there were tellers to spin the tale, but a small number of commonalities hinted at underlying truths. Despite the efforts of many scholars, of which only a few now survived, Peach's life story remained mysterious.

A popular version told of a debauched cabal of Toad wizards laboring for years in an unspeakable fungal nursery deep beneath their subterranean cities. There they made pacts with the darkest pantheon of Great Powers and worked increasingly intricate and loathsome transmutations upon a specially bred destroying angel mushroom, until at last it yielded from its delicate body the queen, fully formed and hungry to wreck destruction upon their hated enemies, the surface dwellers.

Less popular was the rendition where Peach arrived in the capital of the Old Kingdom, little more than a waif wrapped in the filthy tatters of a dress too soiled and sun bleached to guess its original color or styling. She spoke a language none had heard before, yet she mastered their tongue in a month. After two months the waif was revered as semi-divine for she could work miracles of healing and cause crops to thrive with her blessing. Not until her most devote acolyte betrayed her into the dungeon of a rival mage did the young woman start on the path of evil. Bowser gave more credit to this version of the story because he had personally witnessed the truth of alternate worlds beyond his own.

Whatever the secrets of Peach's beginnings, history recorded well what happened next. The young woman commanded fierce and subtle magic and thereby gained a following and wealth. From the springboard of a loyal cult, Peach launched into politics. Her platform was simple: the commoners were impoverished by the poor, and only the wealthy could save prosperity for everyone. With the aid of the rich, Peach undermined every service which benefited the common good. Soon the streets burned with riots and public institutions toppled to the cheers of ignorant partisans. By the time the Toads rose up _en masse_ to exploit the chaos and begin the genocide proper, the new queen had destroyed the few upper class holdouts who refused utter loyalty to her regime. Her eldritch might strengthened during these few years. On the final day, of the last battle of the civil war, Peach cast a spell powered by the blood sacrifice of half a million war dead. The magic sundered the land in deep, long running canyons and heaved over its hills. The opposing armies perished in the tumult, and the Toads found the surface changed more to their liking. Darkness fell over the land.

Bowser spoke in a quiet rumble. "Take a long, hard look over this shithole, Koopas. Especially if it's your first time." Breath fogged as it jetted from his nostrils. Outside the jungle the night was cool. "I want each of you to remember what it is you're fighting for. Not just for a warm home and family. You fight to stop her from inflicting _this_ ," he swept an arm across the urban sprawl before them, "on the rest of the world. On our homeland. With Mario's powers at her command, this crawling filth will spread to every inch of the globe."

The kommandos muttered grim resolutions to each other and gazed upon the capital with glassy eyes.

"Say what you want," said Iggy. "At least there's not much grass you have to mow. Low pollen count down there too, which is nice." He bit into a spotted pear, smacking his lips, oblivious to the general disgust aimed in his direction. "I always thought, if Mario's powers are so easily exploited, then perhaps we should simply kill—"

"Silence, worm."

Iggy snapped his jaws shut, cheeks dimpling with pleasure.

Luigi seemed not to hear the exchange between father and son. As usual, he kept his own counsel. Eyes glittering like pieces of jet at the bottom of a cold river, his focus stayed locked on the immensity of metal and stone crouched against the horizon, the main keep and surrounding towers of Castle Peach. The lair of the queen seemed to hungrily swallow the light of stars and moon and lamp.

"Break time's over. Let's go."

They descended in a serpentine line, keeping the road on their right, close enough to watch for traffic, far enough for the darkness and scree to hide them. The slope was stony and steep. What few trees grew in the cursed soil were twisted runts. A few rugged trucks crunched up and down the road, but no Toad stopped for a look around. The long, painful, dirty march down was mercifully uneventful, until they reached the city wall.

Peach might see fit to leave her borders temptingly open, but like any other autocrat she demanded total security for her own backyard.

A heavy shutter of steel behind a latticework portcullis sealed off the arched tunnel that ran beneath the fortifications. The city wall rose five stories, riddled with windows and narrow slots for weapons fire. Guards paced the battlements at the wall's top in platoons of fifteen. Sentinels lounged about and sometimes even kept watch for a minute or two at nearly every cluster of windows, on every floor. It would take some serious hardware, wielded by at least two thousand determined troopas, and a hearty payload of explosives to force their way through into the city.

Luckily, they had a magikoopa.

Seeing the time to contribute had arrived, Karry stepped forward, wand in fist, a blue scarf concealing a bald head. Strange lights sparkled in the lenses of his spectacles as he assessed the enemy's defenses. After a moment, he took a shivering breath and rolled up the sleeve on his wand arm. The red jewel on the wand tip danced with the same strange lights circling in his glasses, which were not yet bottle-bottom-thick. Karry still had a lot of reading ahead of him.

"All right, I know what to do."

Iggy stepped in the way. "Hey, wait a sec. I know a nifty way to get through this without—"

Bowser backhanded his son. Iggy reeled back, glasses askew, blood trickling from one nostril. The Koopaling let out a shuddering gasp. Bowser stabbed a finger towards the back of the group, facial expression communicating his desire for Iggy to stay the hell out of the way. Iggy shuffled to the rear, smiling.

Karry cleared his throat. "Right then." Up twirled the wand. A nearby section of wall vanished, the cement and mortared bricks collapsing into golden-shelled Koopas and feral Goombas.

"Follow me." In single file they walked through the neat and narrow rectangular hallway his spells conjured from solid barriers. A sizzling tang of magik permeated the air as scales raised their tips off the skin. Shapes spilled from the wand, written in beautiful, awful colors whose names danced into the mind of all who saw them, only to vanish a second later.

Bowser glanced behind to see the konjure Koopas waddle back into the gaps and return to their true forms of stone and plaster and pipe. No mess, everything put back in its place, Karry left no trace that an invading party had come this way.

Leaving behind no evidence also meant no witnesses. About halfway through the wall, Karry's sorcerous tunneling opened into a restroom stall. A Toad sat on the toilet, reading the Mushroom Post. He startled, eyes widening, toilet bowl filling rapidly as a column of Koopas marched into his personal space. Karry hauled up the wand and transformed the porcelain throne into a trio of ravenous spiny turtles.

Three more times they surprised Toad sentries. Each time the konjured Goombas and Koopas fell upon the Toads and smothered their screams, doing their grim work silently with beak and claw. Finished, they dragged the remains back to the holes and reverted to form, the blocks stained yellow with Toad blood, the bodies sealed out of sight within the walls.

In the final encounter, one Toad was quicker than the rest and took off at high speed down a narrow hallway. Karry was quicker. The wand jewel flashed and the guard slammed to the floor, a solid cube of mortared bricks. A curiosity for his fungus-in-arms to discover later, but much less noteworthy than a corpse.

At last they emerged on the other side. The wall towered silent behind them, no alarm raised. Before them, the capital. What had been a vast sprawl when looking down from on high had narrowed to a glum street, poorly lit, lined with the same repeating half-dozen or so franchise storefronts occupying most of the lots.

Karry chugged water, breathing heavily. Iggy favored him with a prim nod. Bowser slapped the magikoopa on the shell and gave him a big grin. Off they crept, keeping to the deeper shadows, mindful of anyone that might be watching from the wall. The concrete wastes of the capital enveloped them.

Hiding became harder. Vast empty lots and wide streets bereft of traffic accompanied many city blocks. These long, flat stretches of pavement required great caution to navigate in stealth. The rescuers scurried from shadow to shadow, finding what pathetic sanctuary they could in doorways and alleys, behind dumpsters, and under the snaking arches of overpasses.

Sometimes there was no avoiding these huge, exposed spaces. Going a longer way around would waste time they didn't have. Sunrise was a scant two hours away and it was a surefire death sentence if daylight traffic caught them out on the streets. In the absence of all cover there was nothing to do about it but run.

For Bowser, the worst parts of this mission were these dashes over open ground, blood pounding in his ear holes, his tender sides stitching up. He imagined what he'd do if a blinding spotlight swept them up in its blazing circumference. Would he freeze up, dive to the ground, or what? He'd rather face an enemy he could see than be exposed and cornered by invisible enemies hiding behind their lights and walls. Raised voices and shouting and fire. A direct confrontation, yeah, that'd be the ticket. The panic of others he could deal with. He fed on it. To chase and catch and crush the soft lumps of Toad heads between his jaws—ah, that would be a fine treat after all the damnable suspense. Keeping quiet and small sawed against his nerves. Bowser yearned to throw his weight around and make some noise.

They were not alone in the darkness. While few civilian Toads walked the streets after hours, the ones lurking through the back alleys and the unlit spaces were a whole different breed. Street gangs and worse, miscreants of a miscreant race, who dared defy Peach's curfew. They tittered from behind dumpsters and watched from storm drains, weapons catching the cold glare of parking lot lights. Bowser had no doubt they'd pick the corpses of his men clean if they got half a second's chance.

Several blocks into downtown, leering goons crowded the alleyway ahead of the Koopas, while another four cut off escape from behind. Hammers and bats wrapped in barbed wire, zip guns and hand bombs improvised with little skill in basement workshops from the scraps of bullet bills and bob-oms.

Their leader swaggered forward, chains dangling from one fist, a razor glittering in the other. "Always heard Koopas were stupid, but damn. What'd you think you were gonna find here, soup meat? This ain't your neighborhood."

Bowser breathed heavily. It wasn't from aerobic exertion. "Buddy, you might not believe this, but I'm grateful for you. From the bottom of my stomach, thank you." He stepped forward and belched, hard. Where the gang captain had stood, a dust devil of hot ash and cinders whirled. Bowser was on the next closest thug before it'd finished flinching back from the heat. He crushed the squirming thing to his chest and gaped wide his jaws. Around him, the hard slap of Koopa boots as his squad moved up to claim their own kills.

Not one of the hoodlums fired a shot or detonated a grenade. Not one escaped, though a few managed to make some noise before they went. The wet work quickly done, Bowser and Koops ordered the kommandos to continue on at a leisurely pace. Though they were desperate to run, it was vital they not show weakness to the rest of the lowlife spectating from the darkness. In the garbage reefs of another alley three blocks away, they held position for ten hideous minutes, hunkered down, listening for sounds of pursuit. For all the feral fungi's seedy ferocity, none emerged from their hiding spots to challenge the invaders again. No sirens blared in the night, no watchtoad patrols swept down the streets.

The night nearly over, driven half mad by suspense, the Koopas' winding trek at last brought them before the high fences of the Castle Peach grounds.

This close to the castle they didn't dare make casual use of Karry's magik, for fear it would be detected. One of the engineer kommandos worked his own brand of magic on the tri-layer fence with a pair of klippers, sheering through just enough links to pry up a tongue of fence wide enough for someone to crawl beneath. When the squad had passed under, the engineer tied the links closed with translucent fishing line. Bowser and his troopas turtle shuffled over an immaculate lawn, invaders then of not only the domain but of the residence of the queen.


	5. World 8-1: No Plan Survives First Contact With The Frenemy

Castle Peach. One of the Eight Woes of the World.

In no immediate danger, the kommandos paused belly crawling to take in the sights.

Searchlights pirouetted in lazy circles, setting the underside of the sparse cloud cover ablaze. One of the rays caught a lone wandering nimbus in its eyes. The cloud winced and scudded away, a scowl souring its amorphous face.

Up close the fortress spanned half the horizon. Its bastions and curtain walls shoved back the sky. The Koopas found it hard to resist the impression that the colossal architecture yearned to fall forward and crush them in a tsunami of limestone the instant they let down their guard. The scale of the defenses made plain Bowser's initial plan to scale the walls using grappling vines was so much ludicrous nonsense.

Legend had it that during the castle's construction Peach buried alive seven wizard kings within the foundations of the seven towers which ringed the central keep, dooming their powerful spirits to guard the fortifications from harm until the churn of aeons passing left no stone married to its neighbor.

Another, bleaker yarn held that it was angels and demigods she had immured within the walls. Peach, wielding a bow of black dinosaur ivory and arrows fashioned from the rays of a dying Star, climbed to the peak of a nameless mountain and thereby shot her sacrifices down from the heights of Sky World. Bowser refused to credit this particular tale. Any act of magic powerful enough to penetrate into those celestial realms, pierce the divine flesh of its denizens, and drag such a victim down to the mundane world would be a feat of eldritch might too terrible to contemplate, much less survive. In retaliation, the Stars would've surely struck the queen low with a curse fit to rot the skin off her still living bones. It just didn't seem realistic, really.

Whether any given legend held a speck of truth or not, no one doubted that many sins had been committed in the raising of Peach's abode and that blackest magic warded its every spec of mortar. The queen had burned all records of the fortress's construction. She personally blinded and muted the architects, ordering their fingers and toes sheered.

For all the disputed lore, at least two facts remained uncontested. Castle Peach was strange, and it was deadly. Every flying buttress and steeple and vaulted roof was a few degrees askew from its neighbor, a tangle of demented architecture which cast a nameless dread over the heart of any beholder. Deep shadows roamed the courtyards heedless of the sun's position above. Few visitors of the vast interior were willing to divulge the least detail of what they witnessed in the course of their stay, for fear of befalling unspecified yet certain punishments. The castle incubated many such grim tales, nearly as many as she who dwelt within it.

* * *

The fence behind, the castle ahead, the Koopas braced for the worst. Tents and supplies littered the imperial lawn, the outer edge of a sprawling Toad encampment. Peach had mustered an army around the castle. A few soldiers lolled about the tents, drinking and playing cards. The infantry Toads paid too little attention to their surroundings to notice a line of Koopas creeping by in the night, and the raiders didn't press their luck by straying close. The distorted buzzing of a sizable Toad host echoed around the south-east bastion, the very direction Koops was leading them. Cold rocks filled the king's belly. Just how many of the toenail squatters did the queen have posted around the gates?

Knives clenched in beaks, the kommandos scuttled through the end of night on all fours, taking cover along the way behind the occasional shrub and pallets of barrels and other supplies the stupid fungi had carelessly dumped into crucial lines of sight.

The rescuers sweated not at all the occasional guard patrols stumbling and mumbling by, sometimes approaching a mere three strides away from their hiding places. Incompetents and sops, all of them. Solid intelligence held that the Queen's Guard was notoriously corrupt, a type of corruption typical of empires—company commanders filling their days with conspiring against their peers for promotions and skimming the top off of payroll instead of drilling their troops into readiness. After tonight, many of these officers would be executed, messily, for the crime of gross incompetence. This thought warmed Bowser like a well heated napping stone.

Adding to the guard's woes, the castle estate was immense and the graveyard shift was grossly understaffed for the amount of ground they needed to cover. Despite possible reinforcement available from the deployed soldiers, the Koopas saw few infantry Toads riding with the nightwatch on their routes. Captains of the Queen's Guard hadn't even thought to request backup for their patrols.

Bowser smirked at the sight. She could drill the little spore spawn from morning to dusk, train them to kill from the moment they waddled out of the cultivation caverns, it made no difference. A Toad could never match up to a Koopa.

Circumventing the bastion and its tower by a wide margin, Koops led them to the hiding place he'd promised. It was waiting and ready for them. They skidded down into a narrow cement channel that fed into the fortress moat. A four-fold grate barred the way through the culvert at its end. Slime and moisture coated its coarse surfaces. Until recently, the channel had been flooded.

"Someone re-floods this channel tonight we'll be in a fine mess," muttered Koops.

"Then why are we in it?" asked Bowser.

"This is the last viable cover we enjoy before breaching the outer wall, about two hundred meters out. My boys used this spot before to conduct surveys on the castle."

"What about the moat itself?"

A pained grimace from Koops. "It's deep and the things that swim its waters are kept hungry."

Collectively they peeked over the edge. Their goal awaited them dead ahead: the eastern gate. Fashioned from immense square-cut logs of dark red wood, banded and studded with black iron, the gate doors could withstand a prolonged assault from the best breaching teams in the world. Set within the lower-right quarter of the right door was a wicket, a small door sized to admit one person at a time. To reach this unlikely entrance into the castle, they would have to cross a bridge spanning the moat designed to collapse if a certain support was destroyed by its defenders.

Besides all that, the only other obstacle they had to worry about between the cement ditch and their objective was a flat stretch of manicured lawn and an army of Toads.

Before the walls massed the imperial infantry, uniformed in frayed camo fatigues and amber caps with rust brown spots. They lounged in sandbagged Bullet Bill artillery placements and milled in chattering crowds around a phalanx of tanks, the orange cinders of their cigarettes flitting about like malign fireflies. Two companies at the east gate, and Bowser reckoned it was likely the same for the north gate and double for the main gate.

Every few minutes patrols would roll by in trucks and on motorcycles, kicking up a great deal of noise so that one could hear them coming a long ways off.

Red mushroom caps spotted with orange flashed between the merlons cresting the wall, the cap colors signaling it was the royal guard, Second Echelon who held the honor of patrolling the battlements tonight.

Indentured boos floated about, dangling lanterns to supplement the coverage area of roving spotlight beams. In the distance they heard the baying of broggies, pulling their handler nearly off his foot pods as they strained against their leashes, scenting for trouble and something to gnaw on. Bowser could sympathize.

He glanced Karry's way. The magikoopa stared off into a place no one else could see, fingers tracing curling and recursive shapes in the air with the slightest movements, lines of green and gold fire trailing from every stroke only to vanish a moment later. Blood beaded the magikoopa's brow. Simple enchantments to mask the kommandos' scent or muffle the sound of their breathing now required supreme concentration. This close to the castle, authoring a spell could well draw attention they did not want.

Peach expected timely reprisal. Bowser felt flattered she had gone through the trouble and expense on his behalf. Or, perhaps, with the outbreak of hostilities and the resulting anxiety among her troops for a Koopa reprisal that would bring down doom upon their spongy little heads, Peach seized on the chance to put her soft-assed home guard through their paces and get them some much needed battle practice. Either way, Bowser's plan had allowed for this possibility. Counted on it, even.

"What now?" Bowser asked.

Koops touched the bandage on his beak. "If the surprise you arranged draws off the infantry, and if Wario unlocks the gate, and if no one spots us, then we rush the gate. Around three minutes between patrols to work with. In that time, we have to cross that stretch of open ground, clear any remaining sentinels off the bridge before they can raise an alarm, and secure the east gate wicket before our presence here is detected. At least there's no land mines anymore. She lost too many guardstoads that way.

"A lot hinges on if Wario makes good on the deal. That door can eat more punishment than we're equipped to dish out. Magic might pick the lock, but that'll take more time than we got."

"And if Wario doesn't come through?" Bowser asked Koops. He regretted the question, for Koops furrowed his brow and seemed to sink under the weight of his insecurity.

"Uhh, well. You're the king."

"Yeah, and you're the best strategist on my payroll. Strategize already."

Koops stared down into a puddle of stagnate water, face tense. "Right. I guess we could try using filthy language."

Someone snickered, but Bowser didn't catch who. "Don't laugh," he growled low. "I just might make you try it."

"Seriously, my recommendation in that case would be to call this off. Retreat and work out another way we can get inside."

Bowser shook his head. "Then our pretend show of weakness turns genuine. Our fate's sealed the moment you show your belly to the queen. We may survive a while longer, running away, but it's just a slower way to die. Screw that. Somehow, we get in there tonight and blow something up. That's my order as king."

No one spoke out against this edict.

The rumble of a tank engine and the murmur of hushed voices drew near. The Koopas huddled down against the algae slick slope to wait.

Bowser met the eyes of each man, Goomba, and Koopa in turn. Numb determination flattened the kommandos' faces. Each banked the coals of their fear and their fury to await the moment when their heat would do them some good—then they would pile on fresh wood and blaze like demons. Koops only shook his head. Luigi combed his mustache, unhurried, relaxed as he squatted in the heart of an enemy empire. Iggy bobbed in place, giddy to get started. A depraved lunatic at home in a paradise of atrocity. For a horrible second the vigorous bouncing gave Bowser the impression his debauched son was masturbating (such things had happened before under similar circumstances), but Iggy was only rummaging through his utility belt pouches. Bowser suppressed a sigh of disgust. To think such issued from his loins.

The night grew colder. Overhead, a front of dense clouds rolled in to smother the half moon's light. Each feeling anew the fragility of their mortal flesh and bones, they waited.

* * *

Koops beaked a silent countdown. _Five… four… three…_

At _zero_ , the sky above Castle Peach exploded in a furious rainbow inferno. Red and blue and yellow flares burst and blazed and then exploded some more. Stone and air and earth reverberated with the cannonade of deafening booms. Toad infantry and guard alike dove for cover as others ran without direction and purpose, eyes wild and faces broken with fear. The concrete hummed beneath the kommandos. The oily water puddles at their feet rippled into countless concentric circles.

Letters of eldritch blue fire emerged from the chaos, searing a message across the sky for a whole minute. What they spelled out was an ultimatum demanding Mario's release or else suffer trade embargoes. A laughable threat. Made the Koopa Kingdom look like a bunch of sugar shells. Maybe, just maybe, Peach would be fooled into thinking King Koopa had, for tonight at least, played a weak hand.

Thunder rolled away into a distant rumble, the show over, but the fading rhythm of the pyrotechnic assault stirred Bowser's heart to greater vigor than the beating of any war drum.

A fine fireworks display by Kammy's greatest pupil, but not a serious attack. If Bowser commanded magic powerful enough to fell an enchanted fortress wall in a single strike, this war would have ended long ago. Peach wove her protective cantrips deep into stone and buttress and bar. When Queen Toadstool commanded in the Voice of Sorcery that a brick should hold itself together, then you'd best bring an army if you entertained a shadow of a hope of shattering it.

However feeble this exercise of mystic might was against the queen's superior power, it served its purpose. The Toad army stirred like a fly swarm shooed up from a carcass. Reports spread with the rapidity of vicious gossip—out in the shopping district several gangs of masked Koopas had been spotted fleeing through the alleyways and side streets. Thieves in the night rather than a veteran army! Easy prey, in numbers the Toads felt confident they could handle. Killing and prestige awaited! Toad captains scampered back and forth, thrashing their indolent charges to hasten in picking up their gear and begin the march out to answer the audacity of the invaders with shell shattering violence.

It took around twenty minutes for the infantry to fall into a mockery of proper martial formation. Another twenty to clear out of the castle's vicinity. Even the bonded ghosts drifted off in train with their mortal cohorts, their chill presence fading from the vicinity like evaporating mist. Bowser and his Koopas learned to appreciate the sensation of seconds dissolving, one fine grain at a time, from the eroding stones of minutes. By now the eastern sky had lightened to indigo before the approaching sun.

With a startling abruptness, Kammy's protégé zipped overhead, astride her broomstick, a fleeting deep blue shadow against the greater darkness. She dropped something heavy which smacked into the mud at channel bottom. A kommando scrambled over to retrieve it. He brought back a hammer bro's hammer, purple ribbon tied around its handle. "They've committed to the bait. Path ahead is as clear as it's going to get," muttered Koops.

Bowser and several others ventured a peek over the channel's lip.

The wicket remained closed. Eight Toads loitered on the moat bridge. Six carried halberds, lucky number seven had a mini-bullet bill launcher resting business end down beside him, and the eighth wore bandoleers crisscrossed over his sloping chest, each studded with round black bombs. Bowser sucked in a deep breath of night air. No way those were Bob-Ombs. He caught none of their signature smell. The sapient explosives exuded the spicy scent of terror concentrated into physical reality. Safe bet, this guy was a poseur who painted his grenades black. No true aficionado of the walking bomb would show such disrespect as to carry more than three Bob-Ombs on his person at a time. Still, while not as devastating, these mundane grenades could explode a Koopa shell just the same.

By some miracle, only one royal guardstoad remained on the battlement above to watch over the eastern approach. Even so, one was enough to sound the alarm, and he was well out of range for every weapon on their person. Bowser looked again at the mini-bullet bill launcher, waiting agleam in the torchlight for someone to wield it.

"How long do we wait?" Bowser whispered to Koops.

"The rest of the night. The rest of our lives... until Wario gets that door open."

Then, for a while, there was silence. The time waste was excruciating. While they waited for a door that might never open, the window of opportunity slid closed with the finality of a tomb's sealing stone grinding into place. The phantoms of sorcerous light summoned by Kammy's understudy had by then evaporated. Within the hour the Toads would return, having found no trace of their quarry.

"Where's the patrol? They should've passed by already." No on responded. The kommandos, feeling the heat of their king's displeasure intensify, had scooched a crucial few inches away. Those not on lookout found something fascinating to stare at.

Bowser took another glance over the edge. The Toads bent in a circle, their focus aimed at the ground where they were playing cards or dice, all pretense of vigilance dropped. One of them would occasionally raise a head for a quick scan. Distracted guards might buy his Koopas a few extra seconds. Big deal. Even someone half asleep couldn't fail to notice a small army charging across the lawn, all those sudden movements and strange little noises where all a moment earlier had been serene, the outlines of shells bucking against the deeper shadows to draw the eye. Camo and charms only got you so far.

Bowser sank down and pounded the cement with his fist, earning a disapproving glare from his captain. The fire within groooowled low. The king's flame yearned for release. Charbroiling the gutter rats an hour back wasn't near enough. Had to get it out, had to let it out.

All this damn waiting. The air scraping in through his nostrils tasted stale on the tongue. He would chew his way through the door to escape this.

Koops hissing in fear, Bowser peeked over the lip of the trench a third time.

The hints were subtle. A slight foreshortening of the metal bracing bands. A thin shadow which had not been there before, pooled where the edge of the door blocked the flickering light.

The wicket stood open. By two, maybe three inches. A narrow gap, through which all hell might ride. A sudden gust of wind might push it closed, and thereby seal the fate of nations.

Bowser gasped for air, throat oven hot. Lights danced in his eyes. Concrete cracked under the squeezing of his claws. Noting how his king had tensed up, Koops took a look for himself. A sharp intake of breath.

"Well shove a Bob-Omb up my ass and twist the key, garlic loaf did it."

"It has to be now," said Bowser. Koops and Luigi nodded.

Coal-oil engines rumbled. Patroltoads mumbled as they trudged alongside the approaching tank. Delayed by laziness, the guards had at last cycled around to the eastern leg of their route. The Koopas ducked back out of sight as the tank and its escort rumbled by, searchlight playing over the mouth of the channel.

Bowser and the kommandos thought they knew the agony of waiting. But there is always another layer beneath the bottom of every hell, which peels back and reveals itself as one gets closer, for in truth there is no bottom. Each imagined hearing the surprised yelling as the wicket's state was discovered. Pictured the priceless security breach rectified by a petulant kick of a boot, slamming closed on their hopes of saving their kingdom. Each, inside the endless minute, envisioned the hollow click the closing portal would make and how they would then sit there, empty of hand and surrounded.

Laughing. The hollow clonking of wooden treads. The groan and sputter of the engine as the tank parked. More laughter, with words exchanged in high cheery voices. Talk of overtime pay. Guards happy the soldiers had gone and they could let their bellies stick out and dice and drink and shoot the shit. Bowser could hardly stand to listen. He bathed in black dreams, swam the blood tide squeezed from all his many, many enemies.

Finally, the voices, the scorched tar stink of tank exhaust, the clump of boots on soil receded. When an eon had passed and the patrol was gone around the corner, a glance confirmed the sentinels remained unaware of the opened door, lost to their games still.

"Now," grated Bowser. He exhaled steam.

"Wait." They turned as one to glare at Iggy.

"I've got something that might help." From the lab coat he produced a brass pocket watch the size of Bowser's clenched fist. Bowser nearly clocked Iggy with said fist, but his son motioned for patience while Koops flailed for quiet.

Bowser compromised with some quality snarling. "Great, we can time how long it takes us to die like Yoshies out in the open."

" _This_ is no ordinary watch. It's a Sub-Conian timepiece, harvested by hand from the queer soils of that half-real land." Iggy caressed the ornate casing with his claws.

"They haven't noticed the door's open yet, but they will," said Koops, snapping his head back and forth from Iggy to the gate.

Bowser turned to the sloped concrete and took the first step to scaling it.

"Wait! This watch will slow time's flow to near zero for ten seconds. We can use it to catch our fungal friends unawares."

"So use it already." Bowser reached the top of the incline and glanced back in time to see Iggy vanish. The instant disappearance created no sound, not even the pop of air rushing in to fill the void. It gave Bowser a kind of mental vertigo, as if Iggy had been an imaginary tormentor never really there to begin with and now willfully erased by his mind.

"Where'd he go?" asked Koops.

"Who cares? It's too much to hope that he's gone for good," said Bowser.

Koops lifted a clenched fist, then drew it down and forwards, the signal to move out. He led the kommandos up and over the lip of the drainage canal. The King of the Koopas vaulted the edge and charged over the lawn, praying the guards did not look their way and that Koops was right about the land mines.

Lock eyes forward. Suck in breath through the mouth and nostrils. Keep hate's heat well fed in its coal bed beneath the lungs, for its fires would soon be needed.

The world bounced and jostled with every stride. Rushing air moaned in his ears. The diminutive figures of the guards grew from mere figurines into the life-sized real things. The royal guard up on the wall was no longer visible. Either luck was kind and he'd wandered off at the crucial minute, or he was already running down the battlements for reinforcements. Nothing to be done either way.

Close enough now Bowser could hear their shroomy chatter above his own panting. And incredibly, impossibly, no one had yet looked up. An insane urge to roar and make them look took hold of Bowser.

They'd trampled over half the distance to the bridge when the problems began. A Toad looked up. The halberdier sprang to his feet and gestured in a frenzy to his mates, indicating they should take an interest in the yonder night shrouded grounds. None of his brothers looked out into the darkness. They watched with eyes and mouths opened in wide circles as the halberdier gurgled blood through a slit throat. Iggy pushed the dying toad over and spat a fireball in the face of the grenadier.

In the same moment, the royal guard plummeted from the battlements above, Karry's multi-colored magic runes already fading from the guard's limbs and mouth. For an instant the guard was free enough from the magikoopa's spell to pipe out a shriek, and then he impacted the moat wall, splattering. The mage had been working intensively so he might accomplish more than just hiding their presence. Bowser made a mental note to promote Karry later.

Koops and the kommandos overran the guards as they lowered their poleaxes to chop Iggy into stew meat. The dawn turned mad with the moist ripping of claw and knife hard at work on soft mushroom flesh. A cry of pain cut off.

Only the bullet bill Toad remained, backing away from the carnage, eyes as round and bright as the searchlights raking the clouds above. Training took hold as he flipped the launcher into a crouching firing stance with one smooth motion. Kommandos closed in. The Toad had time to fire one shell. The Koopa closest to the fungus caught the bullet bill dead center of his under-shell. Bowser felt rather than heard the crunch of bones as the kommando spun off his feet, body limp. His mates fell upon the last guard in a frenzy. Bowser finally arrived, huffing too much to speak, too winded to be disappointed they'd left none for him. He bent over, hands on knees, concentrating on getting out of this shameful state quickly.

"It's not like you to be late to the takedown, Dad," said Iggy. "Good cardio conditioning is key, even when one has a chrono-manipulative device handy. Want me to get you one for your birthday?"

Bowser spat and straightened up. "So that's what it was? Damnit."

"Sorry, I had hoped its effective range extended farther than the personal, but not knowing when I might find a second stopwatch left me hesitant to squander my first on experimentation."

"Shut up, boy. We're on a sneaking mission. Koops?"

The captain stepped up, whipping blood off his claws. "Kollins is gone. Dead before he hit the ground. I don't think anyone knows we're here yet."

Looking around, it was easy enough to believe. No klaxons, no searchlights veering closer to their position. For a minute they were alone. The kommandos had already tumbled the Toad bodies into the moat. The royal guard's corpse finished its slow peel off the wall and plopped into the water to join his kin. Hungry, finned shapes churned the murky waters to green froth as they feasted. For their fallen brother, the kommandos had no choice but to tuck his limbs inside his shell and hide him for later retrieval beneath a small cairn of sandbags.

Three of the kommandos were parakoopas, possessing the gift of flight. Two plucked up Gep and Garry, the other secured a komrade in a full-body carry, and together they fluttered upwards to the battlements to accomplish some wet work and secure an exit route.

Soft giggling accompanied by even more unsettling noises drifted in on a chilly wind. Over the lawn, against a lightening sky, ghost lamps danced, drawing closer and closer, signaling the approach of indentured Boos. The spirits had discerned, with their supernatural insight, the deception of Kammy's understudy, which the Toads would still be struggling to figure out.

Without further delay the Koopas hustled to the wicket. A veteran of the squad, named Karnac, entered first, alone. Seconds dragged past during which no one could breathe. Fingers of ice traced executioner's guide lines over the backs of each Koopa neck.

Karnac emerged from the doorway and signaled 'clear.'

Within the castle: a stretch of bland sandstone brick hallway, a ponderous silence thickening the cool air like humidity. Lamp flames swayed slow and low in their globes with nary a sizzle, the tongues of fire seeming to lean in for a better view of the uninvited guests. No armed response team stampeding down the corridors to offer the warmest of welcomes, and no screaming guards or eldritch watchdogs to sound the alarm. Was this good luck, or something worse?

As Koops worked out the marching order, Bowser stole a second to reflect. The enduring good fortune they'd enjoyed in reaching this point undetected and with only a single casualty strained Bower's sense of credulity. A certainty that something was off, that they'd had it too good for too long, stole over him. Foreboding trickled down the inside of his carapace like ice water. Nothing he could do about it. The way back was closed. They were committed.

From the east gate the kommandos headed west, then veered off into the first side-corridor they encountered. They glided serpentine through service hallways and seldom accessed storage rooms, quiet as settling dust. Working northward through these obscure passages brought them to a large stairwell, with ascending and descending flights of steps. Koops signaled a halt before the arched opening onto the landing and beckoned Karry forward. Hard won intelligence informed them that castle stairways were treated as checkpoints and thus constantly under watch. Royal guards of the Second and First Echelons stood on lookout here, or such was Koops' deduction.

Karry, still pale and bleeding from the nose because of his exertions outside, shambled to the brickwork wall and pressed his ear hole to the mortar. For a while he listened, eyes squeezed shut. Luigi pressed against one side of the arch, hammer ready, cold eyes gleaming. Iggy settled down for a nap. The rest of the kommandos did their best to imitate stone. Bowser tried not to think about who and what resided on the other side of these walls, and how easily they might hear a scream through them.

Taking the greatest care to ease back from the wall, Karry lifted his hands and worked his claws through a somatic twisting. He summoned a silent hologram, revealing a First Echelon guard in his red spotted white cap, standing alert in an alcove beside the arched entryway where he could watch and hear all traffic.

A moment to rearrange their positions and the kommandos were ready. At a gesture from Koops, a trio of seasoned killers charged the landing while the mage cast a cone of silence. The First Echelon guard made a decent try of it, for a Toad, stabbing Karnac through the arm before the other two twisted his head clean off his shoulders.

A second guard Karry had missed rolled silent from a narrow alcove installed above the arch's capstone. Cold blue steel glinted in its small yet well muscled fist. The ambusher aimed for Koops. Bowser gaped his jaws to cry a warning but the cone of silence muted everyone equally. He lunged forward, knowing it was already too late.

The curved knife scythed in to slit the captain's throat. Then Luigi plucked the guard from the air at the last second and crushed him the way one might crumple up a few leaves of paper.

When they had smashed up the heads enough to make certain the Toads couldn't let rip any postmortem cries of alarm, Bowser and the rest crowded onto the landing.

The heavy quiet remained intact. As they patched up Karnac's punctured bicep, Bowser crept to the stairs for a long sniff and a hard listen. Nothing unexpected. The distant crackle of torch fires and the clammy odor of damp stone and the faint tang of sorcery—the latter a scent that had been present since entering the castle. Footsteps and Toads muttering to one another in other rooms, none of them in a hurry or tense with fear. He breathed deeper, through mouth and snout. There, the faintest acrid note of unwashed bodies, followed up with an earthy trace of stale sewage. Not much to go on, but they had to begin the search somewhere.

"This is where we part ways, captain," Bowser said.

Koops slumped his shoulders, the stoic veneer of a professional soldier slipping. "Sir," he said, agonizing over every word, "fall back. Leave the rest to me and my boys."

"Not a chance. I owe Mario a debt and I'm taking personal responsibility in making sure it gets paid in full."

Koops nodded, having received the expected response and obviously not feeling it. "Yeah. Sure I can't go with you at least? Karnac can handle Team Scuttlebutt."

Bowser gave his retainer a growl with no friendliness in it. "You're cruising for a bruising, little turtle. Stick to the plan. Karnac's job is making sure you don't die."

They heard the _posh posh posh_ of velvet booted feet coming down the stairs, their pace unhurried, but drawing close.

"If the Thwomp hits the shit today then my kids are going to need you. Guide them through whatever comes next. You owe it to me to survive this mission, no matter what." Bowser jabbed a claw into Koops' chest. "Got it, pipsqueak?"

Koops regarded his king for a long moment, hesitating just a second more than was professional. "Yes, sir." He saluted, then turned and led Team Scuttlebutt up the stairs without a backwards glance. Captain of the guard, loyal retainer, dear friend... now that he was gone Bowser felt a premonition of grief for what he might lose tonight. What they all might lose.

Koops he had entrusted with the vital task of locating Peach's secret airshipyard and decommissioning the docked flagship, explosively. If the queen's workshops had cranked out more ships, and if opportunity allowed, Koops was to attempt to scuttle the fleet—in the process wasting as many shipwrights, engineers, and blueprints as possible

Bowser's squad carried the code-name of Marinara Dress Stain, or Marinara for short. Their share of the mission had two steps: rescue Mario; escape. If things went plastron-up, Marinara's fiery last stand would create a distraction to draw the enemy away from Team Scuttlebutt's retreat.

Five kommandos remained to accompany their king. Luigi stayed too, which was fine with Bowser. Luigi would prove mighty useful should this evening's salsa get a little too spicy.

Iggy they dragged along because leaving the brat to his own devices had a strong historical precedent of unleashing just the most unproductive breeds of trouble. If the self-styled mad scientist got up to any of his cute tricks, Bowser wanted him close to claw where he could shut that shit down ASAP.

With soft steps Team Marinara took the stairs down. The stairwell bottomed out into another narrow stone hallway, the end of which opened on a kind of basement foyer. Doors and side passages and more stairwells branched off to various cell blocks. A gaoler's desk sat room center, papers neatly stacked, lamp and candles unlit though smelling recently used. All this they expected, but the sheer visual impact of the place drew Bowser and his troopas up short. For a chamber of such grim purpose, it was lushly furnished: rich red carpet sewn with floral designs, cedar paneling, and stone walls enlivened by frescoes of nature's beauty. The painted walls depicted a vista of the Mushroom Kingdom in its lost, golden past. Hazy green with life, blue as a dream of heaven, a warm and smiling land basking in the love of a kind sun.

Bowser was not a Koopa to get choked up by art, but something in the frescoes snagged at the breath in his throat. What manner of poisonous growth did the queen use in place of a brain that she would be inspired to create a monument to a murdered land down here, where the condemned must pass through on their way to a dank cell to await extinction? What sickness thrived in Peach that she preserved in art a natural world her society of sapient fungus bulldozed under an ever-growing scab of concrete, this very castle ground zero of the spreading blight?

Unfazed by the depraved opulence, Luigi commenced sweeping the reception hall for threats. He paused at intervals and cocked his head, listening for something no one else could hear. At the seventh such halting, after a prolonged minute of supreme concentration, he pointed towards an iron door recessed into an alcove, a few steps below floor level.

The hinges were hidden within the jam, the door itself a bolted slab of black metal. A dank, sewage smelling draft wafted out from around the edges. Kranston, Team Marinara's lock picking expert, lit his hooded thief's lantern and aimed its ray of light into the keyhole to make a thorough inspection. He scowled and harrumphed. "Difficult. It'll take me half an hour just to suss out the first tumbler array. Might be enchanted to sound an alarm if tampered with. Don't like it."

Bowser rolled his eyes and jogged to the opposite side of the foyer. Everyone else stood well back from the alcove. With a chugging growl, Bowser charged. Twisting at the last instant, he left the floor, hurtling spiky shell first. The door never stood a chance. It cracked into jagged, steaming halves.

Beyond stretched an ugly gallery of cell doors rotting in darkness and kept purposefully filthy. The stench that uncurled from the dungeon turned the stomach, and for some of those present, summoned up bad memories.

In response to the racket a scratchy voice began calling from a cell further down the throat of slime slick stone. "Is anyone there? I need water! Please, help."

"Mario, that you?" Bowser answered back. No point in maintaining silence. If crashing down the door didn't call the guards running then a bit of chatter made no difference either way.

"Thank the Stars! Get me outta here, Bowser. They're starving me to death."

"Hold tight and keep it down. When I knock at your door, respond with our secret knock." Bowser had changed his mind. Less noise the better. No telling who or _what_ else might be languishing in those cells.

They lit more hooded lanterns and headed in, leaving a kommando behind to watch the foyer. "Here, here..." Mario kept whispering, somewhere far down the gallery. The exact cell proved hard to find. Sound sailed in strange directions. Mario's voice would rasp close enough to startle the listener, yet sometimes echo so faint with distance it strained credulity to believe one had heard it at all.

There seemed to be no end to the dungeon passage. Fear stole over Bowser that he trekked down the closed coil of an infinite loop. Turning around, the entrance was a square of light shrunk to postage stamp size. Shouldn't it be larger—they hadn't gone that deep inside, had they? When Mario's repeated calls sounded consistently close by, Bowser started tapping on doors. For most, he was answered with silence. At another, a deep, scratchy voice purred, "Hello there, stranger." Bowser moved on.

Luigi tried a cell door blanketed in spider webs and was answered by a chitinous scratching which grew louder and closer as whatever he had awoken stirred from its nest to investigate. They ran past that door, pressing against the opposite side of the hall, doing their best not to peek inside the barred window slot.

"Fellas, please, it's this one," said Mario from a few doors down. A hand gloved in soiled white satin waggled its fingers through the window slot. Bowser frowned. He wanted the certainty of hearing the coded response he'd had Mario memorize for just such occasions, but time for a clean escape had run out like an hour ago and this place gave him triple-A grade creeps. If it sounded like Mario, and wore his gloves...

Kranston had an easy time solving the cell's lock, no dramas.

Darkness, reluctant to part before the cutting rays of the hooded lanterns, filled the cell like a nebula of coal dust.

Bowser then made a decision he would never forgive himself for. He sent three of the four kommandos into the cell. Luigi he held back. As that oak-hard chest smacked off the immense hand baring the way in, Luigi looked up, a rarely seen heat warming those cold black glass eyes. In a moment of frustration, and yes, fear, Luigi let slip a vulnerability terrible to behold. Perhaps he glimpsed the same fear mirrored in King Koopa's eyes. Whatever they shared between them in that moment, it touched the human enough that Luigi didn't immediately set to ripping his arm off its shoulder.

Inside the cell, the kommandos had cornered their objective. The Toad posturing as Mario capered about in the filth, flapping its gloved hands, eyes rolling, tongue lolling. It shrieked in delight, no longer sounding anything like Mario.

Bowser heaved a heavy sigh. "Of course. Ain't nothing ever easy." But it had all been too easy, the whole way in. That had been the warning. And he'd ignored it.

"Sorry," the decoy shrilled. "Your prince is in another part of the castle."

Iron plates in the ceiling scraped open. Grotesque lengths of soft, segmented, undulating gray bodies thorny with convulsing black claw stalks wriggled through the murder holes. Wigglers, bred and raised for generations in darkness until they evolved into sightless killers. Pale flesh blushed red as the pulsating monsters flooded over the kommandos like overfilled rivers of thrashing legs, mandibles clacking rapid fire, each worm insane with hunger for the blood of the sighted.

Discretion for the rescuers was at an end. The screaming began.

Nostrils buzzing with the sickly sweet stench of Wiggler ichor, Bowser spun and ran towards where he hoped the exit would still exist. Clomping footfalls let him know Luigi kept pace just behind. Iggy had ghosted, and Bowser couldn't remember when he'd seen his son last.

The far end of the corridor was dark, as if someone had replaced the broken door while no one was looking. Lights blinked on over head. The gloomy, cramped space of the gallery had given a false impression of a low ceiling, but it was really a high one, concealing nooks swarming with Toads. Bowser looked up in time to glimpse a shadow hurtling down towards his face.

A jarring thud. An instant of searing agony as the lights went out. It was Bowser's turn to disappear.


	6. World 8-2: It's Not Easy Being Dream

"I feel insulted, more than anything else."

Bowser dimly sensed someone dragging him over flagstones and up steps, heedless of how they further dented his lolling skull. Contrary to popular myths about cranial trauma, taking a hard blow to the head didn't send the victim into a peaceful nap. Sensation still seeped in, blurred and distant, and it was hard to care much about any of it. Pain did all it could to further distract from the proceedings.

"As a king, you well know gossip pierces deeper than spears."

Her spite drilled through gauzy layers of concussion. Peach's voice brought Bowser back, like a conjurer summoning their favorite monster from the Underworld to the gritty plane of the Real. Now he cared. Now he'd brave the agony beating a furious drum solo against the interior of his cranium. Another head wound, and more bleeding to go with it. If these assaults to his scalp kept up he'd go bald one day soon.

The room slowed its spinning, taking its sweet time applying the breaks. The shroom scum had flipped Bowser over on his shell. Insult slathered onto injury.

"You defeated me once. If the world catches word that my 'great' nemesis is really a clown playing with fireworks... What, in turn, will they think of me then?"

Blood in his eyes made seeing fine detail a chore. What little resolved out of the blur hinted at tasteful decor. Expensive stuff. The kommandos lay in a row beside their king, likewise upturned on their shells, wrists bound to ankles. Still no glimpse of the target. But he could still hear her.

"The illusion of Koopa anarchists scurrying through the streets. The..." and her lip audibly curled in disgust, "little love note scribbled by your backwoods stick rider, begging for favors in the sky for all to see. Then this unseemly rush into such an obvious trap. Amateur embarrassments so pathetic the world would accuse me of making it all up out of spite!"

 _There_ she was. Perched on a mezzanine to better shower all with disdain. Details began filtering in. The pink pastel queen of darkness herself leaned on a handrail of some rich, dark wood polished to shining luster, supported by baroque balusters carved with designs of flourishing piranha plants. As always she wore an evening gown with voluminous overskirts, the same variety of dress in which she posed for portraits. The royal brooch glittered on her breast. Upon her hay yellow tresses rested easy the four-peaked gold coronet, inlaid with gems larger than her eyes.

Peach's hands were empty. This time others held the weapons for her.

"Not that I will allow description of your sorry pranks to survive into record. Oh no. I will burn everything you have ever touched in fondness. Bury every generation of your line. Raze every monument. Tear down every holding and have the foundations hammered into gravel. I will spur my scientists to toil unto death to discover a method by which I might retroactively atomize your presence from history. Erase you so thoroughly that future generations will not even have a speck of ash or shard of shell to remember you by."

A Toad stood on his chest and glowered, a stocky runt almost as wide as it was tall, trying its best to tower with menace. Tiny hands held a studded club, a spatter of blood on the business end. The cudgel hovered, heavy with promised threat.

"Your failure is so complete that I rue the bribes I squandered on your betrayers."

A familiar face swaggered onto the mezzanine to join Peach.

Wario hugged a platter of layer cake, the pastry half-gone already and rapidly vanishing by the heaping forkful as the thief shoveled it away. Glutenous chortling escaped in loud, crumb-laden gusts through his nose while the maw was occupied.

He waved. "You were right. Best cake in the world! By far. _Mmmmff_."

Peach's voice, impossibly, grew even more self-satisfied. "Of course, I was first to approach Wario with an offer. I instructed him to accept your commission. When he waddled back and submitted a report detailing your plans for this ruinous rescue attempt, I nearly had him killed. I thought he was abusing my good humor by handing me a piss take instead of what I'd paid him to learn. Inconceivable that even you would resort to such an asinine scheme."

For one delirious moment, Bowser fancied Peach stood within range of a hasty lunge. On second glance, she was too far away to reach. Eyes be damned. Feeling game for an insane last gasp play, he swept the club Toad aside and kippered off his shell. Brain swirling, vision flipping somersaults, Bowser had a hard time gaining his knees, much less planting two solid feet beneath his bulk. The swoleshroom stepped up and buried a curly-toed shoe into his side. For such a small foot it delivered a load of pain. Bowser _whuffed_ and sank back onto his belly.

The heavyweight short stack stuck close, observing the suffering in detail with dead, black poker chip eyes so much like Luigi's. For all that it maintained the stoic mien of the unfeeling professional, the Toad's bland features sweated the squalid glee of a sadist bully doing what it loved and getting paid in the bargain. _Yeah, enjoy the show, shit-born. You've just earned the number three spot on my_ list.

Recognition struck through the brain fog with the searing brilliance of lightning. This capped cadaver consumer wasn't just any Toad. He was _The_ Toad. His red-spotted white toadstool cap had been formally adopted as the official color scheme of the First Echelon's head gear. The Toad was probably the least Toad-like of his entire race. He should've been born a Koopa.

Whatever birth name his cultivators selected upon his sprouting was long forgotten. The Toad had earned his pretentious moniker through long years serving as the queen's left hand and her chief bodyguard, comfortable dealing out violence with efficiency and discretion, or with flashy excess as the situation demanded.

There were legends whispered far from the capital that long ago, while escorting Peach on a sojourn through the Negative World, The Toad's soul was stolen from his body and replaced by an alien presence, one of those incomprehensible entities of inscrutable motives which sometimes slipped through a crack in the walls of brick and stone and sky that closed off the Worlds from the infinite gulfs of the Outer Bounds.

To Bowser, The Toad smelled like a pizza topping begging for a fierce broiling, to be dished out as soon as was convenient. Right now would work. Bowser swiped at The Toad, who nimbly danced out of reach. "Fast little crotch crop, ain't ya?"

Bowser kept after him, scrapping across the stones on his stomach, sweeping his claws and snapping at The Toad like a riled crocodile, still too dizzy to attempt standing.

The Toad made a begrudging retreat, evading each claw and bite by a mocking inch. His fellow guard elite tittered. Bowser didn't care. Dignity was overrated. Closing jaws on the enemy, snapping their soft bones, organs bursting on the point of a tooth—that was worth enduring any indignity.

In a sudden rush, The Toad stopped retreating and came on, club whirling in a gray blur. The blows rained down. Bowser shut tight his maw to avoid losing teeth. A spike snapped off his carapace. The left horn cracked. Blood welled in his nostrils and poured hot down his neck. The beating stopped when The Toad swung up by the cracked horn and mounted the back of Bowser's neck. He spurred the jugular veins with his heels and slapped the shell, pantomiming a ranch hand breaking in a rowdy Yoshi.

The chirping mirth of the peanut gallery graduated into a stinging hail of belly laughs. Wario's coarse guffaw overrode the whole chorus.

Blood soaked carpet squelched beneath Bowser with each shifting of weight. Darkening blood spread over the checkerboard marble tiles beyond the carpet's tasseled edge. Too much blood to lose and remain alive. It then dawned on Bowser why the five captured kommandos of Team Marinara were so silent. Kranston and his squad mates lay pale and still, with heads hauled back, each throat slit.

Some survived. Luigi knelt under the weight of great chains. They'd locked a black iron, studded collar around his neck, steered by four lead chains clinking in the white knuckled grip of several Echelon 2 guards. Of all the Toads present, only Luigi's handlers remained solemn, faces glistening with flop sweat. Murder smoldered in the depths of the flakes of wet obsidian Luigi used for eyes. Iggy was, alas, also alive, gasping and bloody, the crown of his head swollen from a steel bat love tap.

Peach leaned over the railing, as if to carefully examine some newly noticed detail. "I've won, today. Yet, a tinge of disappointment haunts me. A sense of opportunity wasted. Of all the rivals I've cleansed from history... you. I always believed you'd be one worth remembering. I expected more out of you, my vanquished, than this pitiful gambit." She let out a girlish sigh. "Now we must make an end, just when the middle game was heating up. So... premature."

The guards dragged Luigi away, faces red as they hauled on the chains for leverage. Their prisoner thrashed and growled, spattering his handlers with spittle froth. When a pair of the fungi stooped down for Iggy, Peach called a halt. A cruel smile dimpled her heart-shaped face. "No. That one isn't bound for a cell. I'll see to him, personally."

"Fuck you want with him?" Bowser croaked.

"Dead Koopas aren't privileged to ask questions," snapped Peach. Despite the carapace covering Bowser's back and sides, The Toad still found a sweet spot to plant his sharp heel.

Wrath warmed Bowser, stirring up a cyclone of red sparks inside his guts. Bowser surged up, roaring, jaws gnashing, and felt the club bounce off his skull. Cold black stars rained down, extinguishing the inner firestorm. His roar guttered out on a warbling, confused note. For the second time that morning, he disappeared.

* * *

Star Hill, paramount among the Eight Wonders of the world.

Like no other mountain it embraced the sky, peerless in its majesty. Its slope tumbled down to misty lowlands which receded into purple hazy distances. The whole mountainside glowed in burning blues and turquoises and violets—the very stones beneath their feet shimmered with indwelling power. Dull gleaming shards of fallen wishing Stars littered the ground.

In times past, pilgrims from all nations and races quested to Star Hill to beseech the Stars for guidance or healing miracles or salvation from war. They came here so a Star might reckon their desire a worthy one and grant their wish. But one could only enter into the Hill's holy precincts if the fortunate supplicant knew the secret paths, could navigate the sprawling labyrinth of the Pipe Maze, or if they possessed a Key that would open the right sort of door.

Bowser had used such a Key to bring what was left of the Koopa Kingdom army here to rest in safety and bandage their wounds. The Toadstool Queen had cut off the last path home. There was no place left to run.

Bowser flopped down on the blessed mountainside, panting, woozy with thirst. He grunted, dismayed to discover some of his wounds had began to bleed again. The muscles of his legs and back felt as if they'd forgotten how to unclench. Brought to the limits of his strength, there he rested amid the grounded stellar splendor, brooding on the empty sky. In every direction, the remnants of the Koopa host did the same, though few bothered following their king's example by looking up.

None dared to hope a Star remained in the ransacked firmament to grant them any one of a long, long list of desperate wishes. And they had been right to keep expectations low, for the queen had struck the Wishing Stars from the sky when she shattered the Star Road with her blasphemies. The Paths and Ways grew steadily more poisonous to travelers, and evil things stalked passages that had once been sacred. Bowser had lost troopas in the retreat to Star Hill. Yet, for all the queen's depredations, some faint trace of numinous presence inhabited this place. A faint and fading sparkle that eased spirits and lifted heavy hearts. Star Hill would make a better place to die than most.

Bowser gazed deep into the empty heavens and said, "I wish someone would come along and save our collective asses."

"Have a care what you say in this place, sire." Kamek groaned as he eased his old bones down onto a nearby rock. The desert had claimed his broomstick, leaving him grounded with the rest of the mere mortals. Too much teleporting gave him a headache, which looked to be the case at present as he pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "That was a good wish, though."

Bowser snorted with disgust. Waving an arm at the dark blue void, he said, "Doesn't matter if I beg proper or sloppy, nothing's left to hear it. I've led us all into a dead end."

"This is the last place left to us, my liege. Whatever time we buy for the defenders back home to brace for the storm is precious. And perhaps our visit will not be in vain." Kamek's voice lowered to a husky whisper. "Long ago, in my all-but-forgotten youth, I had a dream about this place. A vision, perhaps."

Bowser lifted an eyebrow. "Do they come true, these visions?" He refused to take the full share of bait and ask after the content of the mage's dreams. Any more false hope and his mind would crack.

Kamek shook his head, frowning. "Only the unpleasant ones. But this one felt different. It was a vision of hope, I think." Back bowed with exhaustion, he lifted his wand. With a waggle of the wrist, a spell like a comet cloud of glitter zipped from the wand's jeweled tip to burst against the king and soak into his scales. The pain of Bower's wounds grew less severe, the bleeding trickled to a stop, which made dashing to catch Kamek before he toppled over a lot easier.

"You've pushed yourself too far, you soft little bookworm," grumbled Bowser. "Get some sleep already." He laid Kamek on a gently canted angle of smooth star stone, cool and gray after granting its wish and plummeting to the earth in some happier past.

Shouts and screams drew his attention down slope. Out from thin air a pair of star doors gaped wide to disgorge columns of soldiers. Irregulars, by their motley armor and arms and lack of banners. They were assorted sellswords and rogues conscripted from the queen's conquered territories. Pianta outcasts, Whomp mercenaries, even some regiments of Boos, all the peoples Peach considered expendable. The queen thought so little of Koopas that she had sent in the cannon fodder to finish them off. Or so Bowser thought.

Further downhill, on a flat shelf of rock, another star gate yawned to admit a company of Toad infantry. Behind their ranks marched the First Echelon Royal Guard in box formation, and in their center hovered the gold and pink silk palanquin of the queen Herself. Peach had come in person to make sure the job was done right.

Trumpeters sounded the call to form and close ranks. Reedy wailing blew from gaping Koopa skulls forming the mouths of their Koopa shell horns, while drums fashioned from the femurs and cured skins of vanquished kings boomed a battle march to quicken the pulse and remind all of the ultimate price for failure. Judging by the flurry of activity below, Peach intended that the slaughter should commence immediately. While the queen's forces had the advantage of numbers, stamina, morale, supplies, and time, perhaps the Koopas' position on the high ground unsettled her.

The Koopa soldiers looked to each other, too tired to withdraw into their shells. Faces dirty and dull, eyes bright only with fear, reduced to frightened hatchlings casting about for a mother who would never come to reclaim them. A few reached for their weapons. Others eyed the heights, seeking a possible escape route. Wounds encumbered everyone, some so cut up they were unable to walk unaided. Many had carapaces held together with soiled bandages and dried mud—beaks shattered with no plaster and wire to brace them. Gore caked one and all, and whether it was the enemy's or their own viscera was impossible to tell. Most painful for Bowser was the sad resignation in the stares of his son and daughter.

The marching song of the queen doubled in volume, as did the tempo of the beating drums. Some began twitching in rhythm to the pounding skins. Others covered their ears and began to weep.

"It's been an honor, Dad," said Larry, his constant smile turned sad. He smoothed down a cockscomb of azure hair to don his helmet. Wendy, face twisted in a pained grimace, turned away and spat.

No, this would not stand. Bowser could understand and accept a moment of weakness in his troopas as they stared down their oncoming deaths, but he would not abide his own brood surrendering meekly to the inevitable. Up he leapt onto the canted arms of a crashed star stone. Over the bedlam of unhallowed noise Bowser roared back in challenge. Jaws wide, tongue flapping, blowing slaver, he bellowed until Star Hill shivered, until the pebbles danced loose and began to rattle down the mountain in sparkling streams of stone. The hideous racket of the queen's legions faltered, the drummers missed beats, the trumpeters ran short of breath mid-blow.

His son and daughter looked up, blinking. Awake. The Koopa Troopas focused on their king. All stood to attention, if not yet encouraged, at least careful to conceal their desire to flee.

Bowser pumped his fist into the air. "Hey, don't go marching off to the beat of toadstool drums. You all forgetting who the real boss is around here? Here's a hint, dipshits—It's me! And as your boss I say it's time to kick some ass, Koopas. They think we're licked. Down to our last gasp. But we haven't run away. We've lured the Bitch right where we want her. And now we're gonna cut right through those punks in the vanguard like wet toilet paper. Then we'll waste her body guards and rip Her Royal Lowness right out of her fancy chair and eat her alive and kicking. One more banquet aboard the Bruise Cruise Express, and then we go home and sleep for a thousand years. Who's with me?"

Koopas and Goombas stiffly tottered to their feet and gave back a ragged cheer.

"This is more like it," said Wendy. She grinned, teeth still smeared with blood. "Dibs on that skank's face."

Larry pounded his breast plate with clenched claws. "Better to die trying than just give up."

Tired yet strong, the Koopa Troopas formed into two loose lines. Too few able bodied soldiers remained to manage a third. Many limped into place. The worst injured had to be left in back, propped up against boulders with weapons resting in their laps so they might get a last lick in before the fungal tide washed over them.

Toad sergeants goaded the hodgepodge irregulars into a charge before they had finished organizing into proper ranks. In massed confusion, the queen's fodder surged up the hill. Peach wanted this ended, now.

Bowser aimed to disappoint her.

As one, the Koopas flowed down the hill, constricting into a wedge with their king on point as they neared the hated foe. Forgetting his wounds, Bowser threw himself forward full tilt, Larry and Wendy two steps behind.

"Sire, look up!" Bowser heard Kamek's voice in his ear, despite having left the magikoopa far behind to work whatever cantrips he could. He obliged, turning his gaze to the velvet blank above.

A Star was falling. A wish had been granted.

The star stone impacted with a meteor's fury and heat into the screaming host of the Mushroom Empire, hurling bodies and pieces of bodies into high soaring arcs. The shockwave knocked both armies onto their backs.

A fun sight, to be sure, but the results were mixed. Bowser's charge was spoiled and Peach still commanded the superior numbers. What happened next changed everything.

From its bowl of steaming earth the star stone began to unfold itself. Angles spiraled out into higher dimensions, edges bloomed yet more edges, shapes growing larger and smaller in ways that made no perspective sense. Toad and Koopa and sundry creature alike watched the metamorphosis in rapt stillness, nearly silent except for the occasional involuntary grunt of fear.

At last, a doorway appeared in the heart of the stone, first appearing as a speck, then drawing closer until it was large enough to fit three Bowsers. As the door arrived, irising open, it released a cold wind which smelled of strange dust. Through the portal, in blazing golden splendor, rushed the banished Stars. At first they came in constellations, then in great bee swarming clusters. Around the blinded soldiers they zipped. Up the lost Stars flew in a great legion of jewel fire to once more populate the sky. The procession of Stars sang as they returned home, with melodies painfully beautiful to hear yet impossible to remember afterwards. Nearly lost beneath the great swelling stellar hymn, a woman's high voice rose in a wail of dismay.

When the last Star had swooped through, the door between worlds remained open, its work not yet finished.

On the portal's other side another world wavered in summer heat, a city of glass and brown brick and steel. The architecture was like nothing the diverse gathering of warriors had seen before—grubby and functional, yet not without a squalid charm. Painted chariots of metal and fine crystal rolled along streets of poured stone, while the grim towers and woven steel thread span of an unthinkably immense bridge loomed over the heads of tall brick hovels.

Two beings—later Bowser would learn to call them men—walked out from a crowd of wide-eyed onlookers and, with only a second's hesitation, stepped over the threshold from their world onto the luminous soil of Star Hill. The Seven Elder Stars floated in on their wake.

The pair's clothing looked strange, smelled stranger. The city noises and speech leaking in from the other world clashed against Bowser's ears. Pollutants borne on the alien wind burned his nostrils with exotic intensity. What would such strange visitors possibly want from humble Koopas? What could they possibly say to one another?

The Seven soared into the sky to rejoin their kin, leaving the strangers to their introductions.

"Uh, hello everyone," said the shorter creature, its mustache waggling. Probably it was the blessing of the Elder Stars that allowed them to understand one another's alien tongues. "The name's Mario. This is my brother, Luigi. We found your star friends while out repairing a boiler and agreed to help them find a way to get back home. They asked us to come along, told us you needed help. And, well..." Mario paused to rub the back of... his neck. "Seeing that we're flat broke and the landlord kicked us out of our home and business, we figured we could crash with you for a couple a' weeks. Just until we get our feet under us again. If it's not too much trouble, that is."

Bowser stepped up to the hairy little critters. Mario and his brother looked like they wanted to run. Fear stink rolled off them like a bad cologne. He realized then how he must look to them, gusting steaming breath from flared nostrils, streaked with gore, looming over them all scale and spike and twitching muscle. Yet they stood their ground. As King of the Koopas, he held no fondness for weak and cringing things. To walk into a world not your own, interfere in a strange war between alien peoples, and make such terrible enemies before one can reckon the odds—there was no word in the tongue of Goomba or Koopa or Toad for the immensity of courage required. Strength must recognize strength, or it is no strength at all.

Down slope, the queen and her scum ran back through the doors they'd opened to reach Star Hill, the portals already closing on the panicked rout. The Koopa Kingdom, and its people, would survive to fight another day.

The waiting humans shuffled their feet and looked back to their own door, vanished and likely never to open again, the star stone which had powered the portal now glowing cool and dim. Mario wrung his hands. Bowser reached out and clawed the back of one open. Before the man had time to yelp in pain, he crushed Mario's bleeding hand in his own lacerated paw and they shook the firm handshake of blood brothers.

"Greetings, brother," he growled. "You can crash in my castle and eat my food and sleep with anyone there who will take you. For as long as you live. You're family now, whether you like it or not."

"Oh—uh, thank you. Uh, mister...?"

"Koopa. Just call me Bowser." He drew up in a regal pose, claws on hips. "I'm the king around here and don't you forget it."

"We won't," said Luigi, who had stopped shaking enough to force his lips to part.

"The Star Spirits." Bowser gestured to the shimmering heavens, resplendent with a million flaming gems where moments ago there had been only void. "They listen to you? Talk to you?"

"Yeah. Guess you could say we got to be good friends while we worked out a way they could return home. It wasn't easy. Not a lot of magic in Brooklyn to work with, and government goons chased us all the time. Nothin' bonds people together like an overlong series of shared misadventures. They told us—"

Color suddenly flickered out of the world. Everything stuttered, movements slowing. Mario's voice and the wind's song blurred as they degraded into a basso drone, dissipating into the crackle of an old recording. The world around Bowser flattened, as if all reality was and had always been a mere projection on a screen. A screen which began to bulge, then rip open.

Out from the backstage realm of dreams, through the fluttering tear emerged Wart, King of Sub-Con. All the royal raiment of his kingship bedecked his rotund personage: the nightmare fur trimmed robe of white cloudsilk, the Crown of Possibilities set with gemstones the like of which did not exist in the waking world, and the scepter of the Dream King clutched tight in one webbed fist, the Morpheus Ruby set in its tip. The ruby blazed as Wart tapped into its power.

"Hail, friend. I'm glad to find you alive," he said.

"Until you broke through, I didn't realize I was dreamin'. Funny, ain't it?" Bowser mused. "How we can dream every night of our lives, and yet inside a dream we always struggle to tell it apart from what's real."

The King of Sub-Con favored him with a sad smile.

"I have heard your calls requesting aid, but until this moment I have been unable to respond in kind," said Wart. "Unless conditions change for the better, I will not be able to provide the reinforcements and supplies for which you've rightfully asked. The roads between my world and yours are not what they were. Many doors stand closed to my hand. A dark mist has risen between our dominions, like the kind that sometimes boils up from Vanda, and our connection is fleeting when we can manage it at all. Only now, that you are closer to death, can our minds meet.

"As for your _other_ request, my best agents are hard at it. However, they will need more time. It shames me that I cannot offer you direct help in your hour of need." Wart bowed low, graceful for all his bulk.

"Yeah, that's the times we're living in. Everything's getting harder."

Filled with the detached peace of dreaming, Bowser held no desire to complain or rage, though his waking self would react otherwise. Baseline, workaday Bowser, were he present, might comment that for someone so powerfully weighed down with an inability to help, Wart was going all out delivering an I.O.U. in style. The frog king meant what he said, though. And he was brave to do it.

Bowser was a prisoner of the Mushroom Empire. Intruding into his subconscious, even if only to provide a word of comfort, was to commit a grave trespass. No matter how slight the succor supplied, Peach did not forgive those who helped her enemies. If caught, Wart might as well formally declare war against the queen right now. Sub-Con would find itself promoted to high priority on Peach's list of Problems To Be Dealt With.

"I'm touched by your concern," said Wart, making a short bow.

"I didn't say anything."

"But you were thinking it. Fear not on my behalf. I've made my way already onto the queen's black rolls by walking through her nightmares." Jiggling like a frightened water balloon, Wart quaked with horror. "In them I have espied Peach's vision for this world, and all others. Death, however painful, would be better than surviving into those grisly futures."

"So tell me some good news already."

"The queen inhibits my contact with you. She has neglected to take into account your retainer, Koops. I've done what I can for him. May he do the same for you."

Shadows, like those cast by dancing fires, fell over every surface of the dream. They reduced Wart to a writhing blob of black ink lit dimly by a guttering candle.

Wart spoke from somewhere behind Bowser's head. "Our time is being cut short. Be strong, friend." The frog king's floating voice held a sadness deep enough to shake Bowser even while coddled in sleep's cushioning. Among the flickering tongues of shadow, figures contorted and swelled and reached out for Bower's eyes. "It's not much of a chance. And there are so very few left who care to try. Protect him, old friend. Time is..."

Around them, the dream wore thin. A light, not of any spectrum visible to the waking world, but of the hideous color of true Nothing, began to shine through. Bowser's link to Sub-Con was about to collapse.

What was left of the King of Dreams turned to leave. Bowser struggled to lift his arm.

"Wart. There are Sub-Con artifacts leaking into our world. My traitor son had one, and Peach tossed a bane turnip at my head. She has designs on your realm too. Her dirty fingers are digging into all our pies!"

The puddle of sagging shadows nodded. "Nothing lasts forever, dreams least of all. Thank you for the warning."

The dream snapped apart like a strip of film held over a match flame. The recoiling ends carried Bowser away, reeling him up into reality.


	7. World 8-3: Science Will Break Your Heart

Bowser woke with a gasp and immediately wished he could go back under. Reality resumed ramming its dick through one ear hole and out the other. Everything hurt, the shattered pottery of his head most of all. They'd strapped him belly down and spread-eagle over an examining table, its steel surface still chilly against his scales.

Hard to see much with his neck yoked down tight, but what he could glimpse of the joint was a small room crowded with cabinets and chests. The stale air was bitter with the ammonia stench of strong cleaning chemicals, the harsh stuff used in places that got real messy. Powered tools gleamed in wall brackets, several rows of them on the wall before him. All clean and well maintained, their cutting edges scored by frequent use and resharpening.

While much of the room was out of sight, its purpose was an obvious truth as hard and cutting as the diamond-tipped saw mounted right before his eyes.

Whichever way his interrogator hurt him first, Bowser hoped it would at least distract from the fault lines of agony grinding open in his skull.

Footsteps approached. A gangly shadow crept up the wall, and an old man followed it into Bowser's field of view. The geezer looked him over with eyes grossly enlarged under fishbowl spectacles. He rubbed blue-veined hands together, each caress striking up a papery rasp.

"Oh dear, oh dear," lamented Professor Elvin Gadd. "If only someone had warned me in advance that today I would have the pleasure of dissecting a rare specimen of Koopatis Rex, I might have commissioned the construction of a special table. One which would receive your carapace so that I could lay you supine and perform this examination by the book. Ah, I'll simply have to take the shell off first. A true pity."

Professor Gadd had made his international reputation by being exiled for multiple kingdoms for practicing the blackest of sciences. Gadd's origins were even more obscure than Peach's, yet his crimes of vivisecting his "subjects" and other experiments too sickening and perverted to speak of in detail he had racked up a body count in the hundreds. Rejected and hunted by even the most corrupt and brutal regimes, Gadd had found a willing partner in Queen Peach. Rumor had it the man had developed a way to harvest the very spirit of both the living and the dead.

Gadd clucked and gibbered to himself as he took a circular bone saw down from its hooks on the wall. Its blade was bigger than the stooped ancient's head. Gadd switched the saw on for a few seconds, listening to the whine of the motor at work before nodding with satisfaction.

Every sight and sound of the old man magnified the throbbing in Bowser's skull. He fought the urge to vomit.

"Sorry, old chap. You deserve better."

"That's all right, old man," rasped Bowser. "When it's your turn, I'll make sure your dying is slow and thorough."

Gadd nodded, his pallid prune face utterly sincere. "Fair enough."

He set the bone saw down on a handcart and there came the clattering of rattled dinnerware. Gadd rolled the cart over to the table, revealing a tray of over a dozen surgical tools, steel polished to a brilliant shine. Fine tools for more delicate work.

A gouty, decrepit Toad charged into view. "You'll not perform functions of science until he's answered Her Majesty's questions!" Toadsworth, Peach's chamberlain, stomped his foot on the floor. Frustrated when the foot stamping produced little noise, he took to arm flailing instead. These hysterics in turn flipped his monocle off his nose, sending it rolling around the floor in ever-tightening circles. "Bother!"

Turning red, the chamberlain shook a finger in Gadd's squinting face. "We do not need a repeat of what happened last time we entrusted you with an interrogation. The queen does not tolerate repeated mistakes!"

Toadsworth snatched up the monocle and bustled from the room. Somewhere behind Bowser, an opened door let in a clanging racket from outside before slamming closed, sealing the lab in relative quiet once more.

The slump of Gadd's spine grew more severe. He moved around the table, inspecting the manacles holding Bowser's wrists and ankles and tail in place, then set up a voice recorder and readied a camera. Most ominous of all was the vacuum cleaner he set against the wall. It was an ordinary wheeled model with a red case and a flexible hose ending in a standard wide mouth attachment. The only visible customization made by Gadd were backpack straps.

A weariness slowed the professor's every movement. An air of injured dignity hung over him.

"Why so glum, chief?" asked Bowser. He was going to be here a while. Might as well play for sympathy.

"The queen once took a great interest in my discoveries. Criminy! So it always ends with laymen. The instant a project's focus wanders a micron from the purely practical, or the work takes on the slightest whiff of the theoretical, _poof_ goes the interest. _POOF_ goes the money." Gadd threw apart clasped hands to demonstrate just how rapidly a patron's favor could evaporate.

Bowser licked dry lips with a dry tongue. "You know, my kingdom has a lively science grants program. 'Get the dough into the hands that know best how to use it,' that's our motto."

Gadd only twisted his vulture neck, giving his head a sepulchral shake. His skin was gray between the liver spots. "Tempting and much appreciated, but I must refuse. My old heart has been broken too many times before. That, and nothing's worse than having Peach as an enemy."

"Too true," croaked Bowser.

"You understand." Gadd nodded, his single lock of stringy gray hair bobbing in echo. "It was kingly of you to make the offer. Now." He switched on the camera and announced the date and time. Roughly two hours had passed since The Toad had captured Team Marinara.

"Let's get shucking."

Bowser fought through the migraine and the bleary filter of grease head trauma smeared over the world, frantic for something he could say that would stall the professor, give him time to escape… somehow. "Think you could give me something for this headache?"

"I would if I wasn't about to vivisection you, old chap. I take no pleasure in inflicting pain. Unnecessarily."

E. Gadd hefted the bone saw, his reed-thin frame teetering under its weight. "You see, there's a wealth of information coded into an organism's pain response. And I've often wondered if your species has any shock response at all, especially when compared to, let's say, a Toad. There aren't many of your breed around, so I must make the maximum use of every specimen that comes to hand. Even so," and he sighed a dusty, rattling sigh, "despite my immaculate procedures, valuable data will be lost today. If only I had more samples!"

The saw jerked to life, the high drone of its motor drilling into Bowser's ears and teeth, into the part of him that struggled so hard now to remain calm.

Gadd moved on down the table, passing beyond the edge of Bowser's peripheral vision.

"I'm serious about giving you money. I have tons of it!"

Another all too calm part of Bowser detached from himself to observe himself. This was the watchdog a king must set upon himself to keep in check his comportment. He saw eyes rolling, scales shivering, nostrils flaring with shallow breaths. He heard a panicky tenor piercing his deep gravely voice. Disgraceful. This aloof fraction was ashamed for the whole.

"Sorry, can't hear you," shouted Gadd. "This blasted thing is so loud. Now, I am about to make a lateral incision along the ventral seam between the upper and lower carapace."

Gadd was dictating to the video camera, Bowser realized. The old man had greater faith in its microphone than his own ears.

Though he couldn't feel the wind coming off the blade through his shell, Bowser swore the heat of its motor bled through. He imagined the growing warmth from the friction of the saw teeth as they gnawed all the way through to the softer flesh below.

Inspiration struck him before the saw did.

"Questions!" Bowser screamed. "You were supposed to ask me questions!"

The whine slowed to a whisper, and was still.

"Eh? Oh, blast it all!" The professor remained out of sight, but it was easy to picture Gadd rubbing his sunken chin in deep thought and readjusting his thick spectacles. E. Gadd reminded Bowser of an older, human Iggy. A resemblance that was in no way comforting.

"Ah!"

"What is it?" asked Bowser. A stupid hope rang in his voice.

"With that audio amalgamatilizer thingamabob I spelled up last month, I can fabricate the Q and A session by sampling and remingling our voices from the vivisection recordings. Why, you've given me plenty to work with already, just from this one conversation. Perfect! Good news, old chap, you won't have to endure interrogation after all!"

"That sounds like a lotta extra work. Be easier to just interview me now."

"Certainly! But I fancy the challenge. As one ages, it's important to try new things."

"But, but... Peach. The questions..."

"Oh, the queries were asinine. The same sort of questions she asks all her prisoners: where are your military installations; troop numbers; alliances; buried gold? And so on. I could gather such intel, and much more besides, with my instruments. If she'd only have a little faith in me. Another good reason to fake our interview, I suppose. With only a fistful of false leads to go on, the queen will once more have to rely on my ingenuity. Now, where were we? Yes, the carapace seam."

The saw started up its whining.

Talking had failed. And the bonds that held him were too strong, with no give by which to steal a smidgen of leverage to pry them open. Despair ate a hole inside Bowser. The more he tried to ignore it, deny its existence, the bigger it grew until it swallowed everything inside him.

It was a terror to move, for some reason which escaped identification. A greater terror still to freeze in place, and so he began trashing against the manacles. Panting heavy, no longer caring what unkoopaly noises piped out between his clenched jaws. His wrists began bleeding.

But he was not so far gone that he failed to hear the squeal of the saw blade as it began cutting him in half. Down there, where he couldn't crane his neck to see, a tugging. Rather than warmth, a spreading chill. After two seconds, the pain arrived. A deepening line of hideous, red pain.

The professor grunted, and the saw stopped biting. A horrible shriek of metal on metal, and then the motor sputtered off. Bowser lay there, taking rapid breaths, certain he would begin to scream and never be able to stop screaming once the saw resumed its work.

"Boss."

Bowser strained his gaze upwards. Koops' concerned face peered down into his. If this was what cracking under pressure was like, then he approved. Bowser began laughing, higher and higher, shriller and shriller.

"You alright, boss?"

"Never better!" Bowser noted he was frothing. Didn't care. "Hey, captain. Mind getting me off this butcher's slab?"

Koops looked like he wanted to weep with relief. "Give me a second."

He stepped out of sight. And didn't come back.

Gadd chuckled and the bone saw began to shriek. Bowser crushed his eyes closed against the waking dream. Swallowed the urge to gibber and scream.

The manacles released their hold on his bruised limbs with the sweetest noise he'd ever heard. Bowser rolled off the table, claws scrabbling over the floor tiles in his hurry to stand upright. E. Gadd sprawled face down on the floor. Watery blood puddled beneath him, trickling down a grated drain in the floor where Bowser's own would've sluiced away.

For a moment, it looked like the sad lump of old gray clothes and old gray flesh quivered with returning life. More waking nightmares. Had to get out of this place.

Bowser and Koops stepped carefully around the widening slick of gore. Having heard the many legends of the deadly doctor, they were keen to avoid exposure to his bodily fluids.

"Sir, you're bleeding."

The cut in his shell's seam was not long or wide, but it ran deep. Blood trickled out in a steady dribble, coloring in a line of acid pain. "I've had worse," he croaked.

Koops forced his king to sit still for a half-minute so he could clean and bandage the laceration. Bowser, feeling dizzy, graciously allowed this. Despite the challenges of their surroundings, Koops got the hole plugged. The captain had always been proud of his field medic training.

Gadd's cramped lab seemed in constant motion with a slow rocking. Bowser glared at the swaying room, a rolling he no longer felt confident attributing to nausea. The various implements of grim scientific inquiry shifted in their brackets, leaning one way then another. And the old man's corpse refused to stay still, the head wobbling on a kinked buzzard neck to the sway of the room. An ugly suspicion formed in his scrambled mind. "Your team was supposed to infiltrate the airship. What are you doing here?"

"We did, Boss. Got aboard all right, and started planting the charges. They were waiting for us. Marsh spawn of the Third Echelon. We blundered right into their black spore clouds and puff ball traps. I clamped a bandanna over my snout and ran. Not sure how I avoided breathing in a lethal dose. I survived by playing dead, my forte," said Koops, voice quiet, somber. "While they were shoving our corpses overboard, I slipped away. It's like I stumbled into a winning streak in hell's own casino. Got lucky guessing which deck they were keeping you."

"Yeah, lucky." Bowser froze, struck by something like sea-sickness. "Wait a sec'. Overboard? Deck?"

The wound dressing complete, Koops looked up and blinked twice. "Oh. I thought you would've realized. We're on the airship now, boss. Took me the better part of an hour to work my way below decks. Stealth infiltration's a lot harder than it looks in the movies, especially when there are no ventilation ducts to work with."

Bowser shook his head, the forgotten headache reasserting itself with renewed vengeance. "Whatever. Grab me some pain relievers and let's breakout Luigi if he's still alive. Then we'll visit Peach and treat her to a manicure, for her face."

Outside of the lab, their sterile surroundings of steel and ceramic tile gave over to the resinous grime of stripped pine logs and black iron rivets. Whatever fresh forest fragrance the raw timber might have once lent the airship's confines, the below-decks now stank of tar, smoke, and unwashed mushrooms. The two Toads assigned to guard Gadd's workshop lay dead, slumped against the walls as if napping. Bowser made a mental note to increase Koops' salary.

Across the sloshing bilge (where the foul water came from when the ship plied the skies, not the seas, was a question Bowser considered for an instant and abandoned just as quickly), the other half of the orlop deck contained four holding cells. Two were occupied.

A cone of flickering yellow light streamed out from one cell's window grill. With eyes adjusted to the gloom of the airship's bowls, Bowser squinted against the glare to peek inside. Torches blazed from sconces mounted on every wall. The Toads had wanted this cell well lit. Hung from the ceiling, the prisoner resembled a beehive woven from iron chains. Alongside the tang of metal, Bowser smelt Luigi beneath the double-thick links.

Koops had helped himself to the guard's key ring and it was a simple matter to free Luigi from his cell and chains while Bowser kept watch. Mario's brother gave them a curt nod of thanks, and took off running down the hall, not pausing long enough to wipe the dried blood from his face. Before Koops could shout for him to stop, Luigi was around a corner and gone.

Bowser took his captain by the shoulder, holding him back. "Let him go. He doesn't answer to us."

"But—"

"He's after his brother and his hammer. Whichever he finds first, I pity the chump who gets in his way. C'mon, let's see who's in this other cell."

"What makes you think anyone's in there?"

The door had no window, peep hole, or food slot. Bowser tried the door. Locked.

"That. And I heard something. Hard to tell what. Not exactly a voice. That whispering noise clothing makes when it moves, kinda."

Koops tried one key after another until he found the correct one. All the while, the cell's occupant stayed quiet aside from the occasional rustle of fabric. Bowser kept to the side, hidden and ready for trouble in case the enemy of their enemy was also their enemy. Of all the possible prisoners he imagined, nothing matched what they found inside.

The lock released with the crash of a bear trap snapping closed. The iron-braced door swung out, unsealing an unlit cell, black as any moonless night. The stench of a filled latrine bucket and unwashed skin hit them a second later. Nothing moved in that unbroken darkness. Only the creaking of stressed wood and the knocking of distant engines broke a silence that strengthened with every passing moment.

Bowser swallowed. "Anyone home? You're free to leave. Well, as free as you can be a mile up in the air, on a flying boat swarming with murderous fungus. You want to help us fight our way out, you're welcome to join in."

Nothing. Bowser looked to his captain. Koops blew air through his beak and shrugged.

"OK. We're going. Good luck."

As one they turned to leave. Koops yelled the foulest curse he knew. Bowser jumped several inches off the ground, arms flailing up like startled birds taking flight before he could consciously lock them into a combat ready stance.

A woman stood in the orlop passageway. Through a mask of grime she favored them with a smile. A ghoul's smile. All Bowser's sphincters pinched tight.

In a voice as soft as a flower petal's caress, as light as floating pollen, she spoke. "Hi. I'm Daisy. Thank you for freeing me from that nasty cell. May I have the pleasure of knowing your names, gentle Koopas?"

Bowser puffed out his chest. When in doubt, swagger. "You're joking. Everyone knows who I am. Bowser, King of the Koopas and don't you forget it."

Daisy turned her cold gaze upon Koops, a fever warm smile still stretching her dirty lips. Koops eventually found his voice.

"Uh, hi. I'm Koops. Captain Koops. Pleased to meet you." He rubbed the back of his neck. He blushed. He touched the bandage on his beak. Then he moved on to trying not to squirm.

"Thank you again for freeing me from that hellish prison, King Bowser and Captain Koops. As you've no doubt noticed, I've been the guest of the queen for quite some time." Daisy looked down at the greasy rags that might once have been a caramel silk ballroom gown. She stopped smiling and Bowser could suddenly breathe easier.

A series of bloodcurdling screams soaked through the deck overhead. The stampede of many boots pummeled the planks like a drum. Impossible to tell if the crazed beat was a march into battle or panicked retreat. Luigi's good work had commenced.

"It would seem Luigi is free as well," said Daisy, gazing upwards and tapping her lips with a fingertip.

"You know him?" asked Koops.

Her eyes widened. "Oh, yesss. A fascinating man. So sensitive. So sorrowful." More screams filtered down. Something heavy, perhaps a skull, thumped hard against the deck, over and over, shaking loose wood shavings to sprinkle down upon their heads. "So furious."

Bowser knew they should be hurrying on, yet Daisy's voice entranced him. And there was something he wanted to confirm. "I think I know who you are. Princess Daisy, of Sarasaland?"

Daisy curtsied. "Just so. Though the proper title is now Empress. The rest of my family has passed into the afterlife." She said this the same way she spoke of every other subject, in a breathy whisper tinged with some emotion Bowser could not define. Wonder? Amusement? Rapture?

It was well known that, of all her adversaries, the only rival reputed to make Queen Peach Toadstool visually nervous was Princess Daisy. People spoke in whispers of Daisy and her dynasty behind closed doors, invoking their names no more than strictly necessary. She had disappeared months ago, and the common consensus was that the truant princess held her court inside the bellies of the Cheep-Cheeps prowling Peach's moat.

"Tell me, does my empire remain sovereign?"

"Yes, but not under your dynasty. Peach leaves Sarasaland alone only because Tatanga seized control in your absence and elected himself Dictator," said Koops.

The captain had a dreamy cast to his face that Bowser liked not one bit. He cleared his throat.

"It's been great getting to know you, Your Grace, but Peach will get lonely without my fist to keep her face company." Doing his best to sound casual, Bowser popped the all-important question. "You want in on that action?"

"Do. I. Ever. You—may I call you Bowser? Yes, you practically read my mind. I would love very much to join Your Majesty in a rampage of uninhibited slaughter. Shall we?"

Empress Daisy gestured for them to follow and began sauntering down the passageway, only a trace of wobble in her gait from the many weeks of deprivation and hardship. Bowser and Koops exchanged nervous glances and followed.


End file.
